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Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse. I.

Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse

Running Amok It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence. They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who don’t live there.

Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musk’s SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. SpaceX's Big Fucking Rocket – The Full Story. Discrimination by Design. This story was co-published with Source.

Discrimination by Design

Data and design in everyday life Lena Groeger A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. The Unbelievable story of a Facebook Impostor. How Slack Grew Into A Billion-Dollar Company . . . Without A Sales Team. Sell me this pen.

How Slack Grew Into A Billion-Dollar Company . . . Without A Sales Team

360 million reasons to destroy all passwords — Free Code Camp. Pinterest Reinvents Itself to Prove It’s Really Worth Billions. Ride-Hailing Start-Ups Compete in ‘Uber for Children’ Niche. Full-time working mothers started HopSkipDrive, which serves all of Los Angeles County and much of Orange County.

Ride-Hailing Start-Ups Compete in ‘Uber for Children’ Niche

The company has received $14.1 million in funding and said revenue was growing 30 percent monthly. It was preceded by Shuddle, which began in 2014 and has raised $12 million. [Update: Shuddle ceased operations on April 15]. SpaceX finally achieves its first successful landing. Technological achievements are, it seems, a bit like buses.

SpaceX finally achieves its first successful landing

You wait for ever, and then two come along at once. In November, an American company called Blue Origin sent a rocket to the edge of space before landing it back on the pad from which it had lifted off. That was an impressive trick. But it has just been trumped by another such firm, SpaceX, which has done the same thing with part of a rocket destined for orbit—a much harder task.

SpaceX’s vehicle, one of its Falcon 9 rockets, was sent on its way from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 0129 GMT on December 22nd. The 4 Transportation Systems You'll Meet in the Future. We tend to think of transportation networks as the result of large public works projects—hello, Interstate Highway System—but lately, private hands have been tinkering at the edges of urban mobility.

The 4 Transportation Systems You'll Meet in the Future

App-based e-hail car services like Uber and Lyft are disrupting traditional city taxi programs. Smartphones are changing the way we wait for and pay for public transportation. And, of course, Google is on the verge of reshaping movement as we know it with the driverless car. It's time to get the public sector talking again, says Anthony Townsend of New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. To start the conversation, Townsend and the Rudin Center have released Re-Programming Mobility—a report intended to provoke city officials, urban planners, and the general public into participating in the future of transportation, rather than reacting to it.

The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.

The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence

Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks. There are people who stand every morning outside the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn staring dead-eyed into the middle distance.

Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks

Forbes Welcome. WhatsApp is not really encrypting your messages. WhatsApp’s security was recently hacked by white-hat researchers.

WhatsApp is not really encrypting your messages

After much click-baiting, it turns out they’re not actually collecting any information they shouldn’t be. They are, however, protecting it poorly, and they still have access to message content with the ability to share it with Facebook. Security researchers at Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic (fun fact: Brno is where Gregor Mendel discovered modern genetics) were able to reverse-engineer WhatsApp’s security mechanisms and published their findings in an academic journal. Read the study. Dizzying Ride May Be Ending for Tech Start-Ups. Signal, the Snowden-Approved Crypto App, Comes to Android. Since it first appeared in Apple’s App Store last year, the free encrypted calling and texting app Signal has become the darling of the privacy community, recommended—and apparently used daily—by no less than Edward Snowden himself.

Signal, the Snowden-Approved Crypto App, Comes to Android

Now its creator is bringing that same form of ultra-simple smartphone encryption to Android. On Monday the privacy-focused non-profit software group Open Whisper Systems announced the release of Signal for Android, the first version of its combined calling and texting encryption app to hit Google’s Play store. It’s not actually the first time Open Whisper Systems has enabled those features on Android phones; Open Whisper Systems launched an encrypted voice app called Redphone and an encrypted texting program called TextSecure for Android back in 2010. But now the two have been combined into a Signal’s single, simple app, just as they are on the iPhone.