Daily Tech News 3 July 2023

• Kotaku and Gizmodo writers are furious - though when are they not - after finding out that new corporate owner F/U Media - which also controls Jersey Belle, Leekspin, and Quarts - plans to replace them all with the new AI-enabled office coffee machine. (Futurism)
  
  "Frankly it produces better copy as well as better coffee," said F/U Media editorial director Brant Bronson.
  
  Staff writers complained that coffee-based trials "had already led to a flood of error-prone, plagiarised, and poorly-written content due to badly implemented - and, some would argue, inherently unsuited AI models - that still have a strong tendency to make up facts."
  
  When questioned on this issue, Bronson agreed, but noted that in blind tests nobody was able to tell the difference. "Except for the coffee. Those guys made shit coffee."

• The dirty secret of why the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico declined to publish a blockbuster story of US government UFO secrets. (Vanity Fair)
  
  It was garbage.
  
  Yes, even by their standards.
  
  
  
• Why do 50% of Americans have subtitles enabled on their TVs? (Indie Wire)
  
  Yes, actors mumble, sound mixes are muddy, and televisions have speakers pointed down or even backwards rather than towards the audience, but that doesn't explain why this is twice as common among Gen Z as it is in Baby Boomers. In fact, there is a strong inverse correlation with age through all generations.
  
  
  
• The first medicine for regrowing teeth is moving towards clinical trials in Japan. (Mainichi)
  
  It's not for those who are missing a tooth here or there, though; it's for those who never grew a full set of adult teeth due to congenital conditions. Humans actually have the ability to regrow teeth in rare circumstances but when it happens it usually doesn't work well and the resulting teeth need to be extracted anyway. This work apparently triggers the same function but in a more controlled way.
  
  
  
• Building a toy programming language in 137 lines of Python. (Miguel Grinberg)
  
  A good place to start if you are interested in that sort of thing.
  
  
  
• Building a simple Python-like programming language in a couple of thousand lines of Python. (GitHub)
  
  Yes, it's a lot more code, but it's clean and readable and the result is not a toy.
  
  
  
• Writing a Ruby compiler in Ruby. (Hokstad)
  
  If you want the real deal, a bottom-up (rather than top-down) implementation of a programming language that can compile itself, here it is.
  
  All the related source code is available on GitHub.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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