At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name.
It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts reached the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated. Some even hit “Subscribe.”
While many have speculated about how GPT-3, the most powerful language-generating AI tool to date, could affect content production, this is one of the only known cases to illustrate the potential. What stood out most about the experience, says Porr, who studies computer science at the University of California, Berkeley: “It was super easy, actually, which was the scary part.”
Jeffrey Rease is running out of time. In 2019, he started a project that would take him and his Nikon D850 from Alabama to Utah, Oklahoma to North Carolina, Mississippi to Arizona. It would introduce him to some of the oldest, and in his opinion, most heroic people in the country. And it would give him a chance to preserve pieces of history that would soon be lost.
The idea: find the remaining American veterans of World War II. An estimated 325,000 of these nonagenarians and centenarians are still with us, with stories to tell. Rease, a graphic designer turned portrait photographer from Birmingham, Ala., wanted to hear them.
His uncle had been killed in World War II when his ship was sunk by a German torpedo. But Rease, 59, never learned much about him as a child. And Rease’s father had served as an Army paratrooper in the Korean War.
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Jeffrey Rease photographs World War II veteran Alvin Lopez, 99, who served as a Seaman 1st Class on the USS Portland. (Jeffrey Rease)
Known for its dramatic landscapes, this outdoor region has trails for hikers & horses.
The Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness is a 47,195-acre (19,099 ha) wilderness area located within the Coconino National Forest in the U.S. state of Arizona.
The wilderness is predominantly wind and water sculpted pinnacles, windows, arches, and slot canyons, and the red-rock cliffs of the Mogollon Rim that mark the edge of the Colorado Plateau. Bordered on the east by Sycamore Canyon Wilderness, the high mesas of Secret Mountain and Wilson Mountain jut out into the lower country, and canyons as deep as 1,500 feet (457 m) drain into Oak Creek and the Verde River.
Prehistoric rock art and abandoned cliff dwellings can be found in the wilderness.
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An image from Mormon Canyon in Red Rock-Secret Mountain Wilderness, Arizona
Well, you can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothin’ to say,” Willie Nelson sings on “Shotgun Willie,” the opening track from his LP of the same name, from 1973.Nelson, who turned eighty-seven in April, has released seventy full-length records since his début, in 1962, and doesn’t seem anywhere close to running out of material. In September, he published “Me and Sister Bobbie,” a memoir co-written with his older sister and longtime piano player, Bobbie Nelson. Through alternating chapters, the Nelsons tell the story of how they were brought up by their grandparents in the tiny town of Abbott, Texas, and the decades of triumphs and devastations (romantic, professional, familial) that they helped each other through. Nelson has published memoirs before (his first, “Willie: An Autobiography,” was released in 1988, and his most recent, “It’s a Long Story: My Life,” came out in 2015), but “Me and Sister Bobbie” feels especially tender and intimate. While music became a lifeline for Willie, Bobbie, who is now eighty-nine, suffered deeply for her art. In the nineteen-fifties, she briefly lost custody of her three sons, after her in-laws successfully argued that she spent too much time playing music with her brother. “Women were made to be homemakers. Women weren’t meant to make music,” she writes. “This sharp-tongued lawyer called me the kind of woman whose only means of earning a living was playing piano in honky-tonks. He referred to me as a harlot. I broke down in tears.”
The phases of the Moon are the different ways the Moon looks from Earth over about a month.
As the Moon orbits around the Earth, the half of the Moon that faces the Sun will be lit up. The different shapes of the lit portion of the Moon that can be seen from Earth are known as phases of the Moon. Each phase repeats itself every 29.5 days.
The same half of the Moon always faces the Earth, because of tidal locking. So the phases will always occur over the same half of the Moon’s surface.
A phase is an angle of the moon to the earth so it appears differently every day.
You didn’t need to know every note of Nirvana’s angst-rock classic “In Bloom” to marvel at the spectacle of a little girl drumming along to the song in perfect synchronization last November, her face scrawled over with joy and passion.
The internet is an open playing field for regular people performing impressive feats, and over a couple of years, Nandi Bushell, a resident of Ipswich, England, had attracted a solid audience by expressively covering famous songs by a genre-diverse range of artists including the White Stripes, Billie Eilish, and Anderson.Paak. Sometimes her father, John, and brother, Thomas, accompanied her, but Bushell was the star, combining technical virtuosity with bright-eyed showmanship (and some enthusiastic yelling).
The sight of Bushell wailing away immediately impressed Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer who played “In Bloom” on the band’s 1991 breakthrough album, “Nevermind.” Grohl is not a social media user, and he only learned about the viral clip when the album’s producer, Butch Vig, sent it to him.
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Dave Grohl and Nandi Bushell after meeting for the first time on a video call in November.Credit…Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times
This distinction recognizes “an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and a nocturnal environment that is specifically protected for its scientific, natural, educational, cultural heritage, and/or public enjoyment,” according to the International Dark-Sky Association.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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