Author: Geek Planet

Time Magazine announced its annual “Person of the Year” this week, only this time around it’s not a single individual but the several billionaires who are launching a new technological order through AI. On the cover of the magazine issue, tech giants including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are pictured sitting on a construction beam, referencing the iconic image of construction workers hundreds of feet in the air on the site of a developing skyscraper. Time’s Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs wrote the following in his explanation of the choice: This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full…

In recent weeks, the short-form video app has shared a plethora of incentives and challenges with its TikTok Shop Partners (TSP) which Digiday has seen — almost gamifying the process, in a bid to encourage more spending. The result: if they qualify, TSPs could receive ad credits or cash bonuses. And here’s what those incentives are: Daily GMV Incentive ProgramTSPs can earn cash incentives between $5,000 and $20,000 between Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, based on their Q4 incremental daily GMV growth — or how much they sell. Partner onboard and upgrade incentiveTSPs can earn up to $10,000 in cash…

Last Saturday, we looked at the film’s opening thought: “Technology and weaponry are the same; therefore . . .” To explore this premise, let’s dive into the movie’s opening scene again. It is often referred to as “The Dawn of Man.” Here’s the music, played by itself.Before discussing the Dawn of Man scene, I should mention a couple details that are important during the opening. First is the music that plays right at the beginning. The song, commonly titled “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” is a tone poem written by German composer Richard Strauss. The song is a tribute to a book…

Microsoft has quietly added a potent piece of storage tech to Windows, and enthusiasts are buzzing about what it could mean for SSD performance. The company introduced a native NVMe driver in Windows Server 2025 that bypasses decades-old legacy bottlenecks in how Windows talks to modern solid-state drives. While this update wasn’t officially meant for Windows 11, resourceful users have found a way to activate it there too. More importantly, the results suggest you can squeeze noticeably more speed from your NVMe SSD if you’re willing to tinker. Taking a deeper dive into the technical aspects, for years, Windows has…

This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author. The black market in human organs does not receive nearly enough attention. China is probably the worst offender here, with political prisoners like Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims arrested, tissue-typed, killed, and harvested to supply well-off buyers who don’t want to wait in the donation queue. We are far too nonchalant about that murderous commerce. Image Credit: Microgen – Adobe Stock Now, a gruesome story out of Nigeria vividly illustrates the sheer evil of this trade in human tissues. From the Daily Mail story: Over 100 decomposed and mutilated bodies have been discovered…

The back-and-forth over whether Publicis Group and IPG were both buying and selling ads for Paramount shows how contentious the practice remains, even as the holdcos try to normalize it.The spark came last week on Paramount Skydance Corporation’s first earnings call under David Ellison’s new regime, when president Jeff Shell sketched out the company’s relationships with the major media agencies. He told analysts that the holdcos were “not just buyers of advertisers, but represent all of our sales clients”, a line that landed with more weight than he intended. It was offered as context for the scramble earlier this summer…

Great minds can unravel complexity. This week’s Micro Softy is relative; it tests your ability to deal with complex relationships. I was talking to Ben recently about PragerU videos, when the alarm went off on his cell phone. He turned it off and looked at the time. “I’m late for a Zoom meeting!” he cried. We shook hands and he hurried away. My cell phone rang. It was my boss Ms.  Sterno from work. Pictured in no particular order are Ben, my mother, her mother-in-law, and me. How are Ben and I related if Ben’s mother is my mother’s mother-in-law?/ChatGPT…

This story by Stephen J. Iacoboni is republished from Science and Culture Today. In earlier posts in this series on the science of purpose, I pointed out that dualities have been employed as fictions of language, a façon de parler, throughout the history of Western science as a means of describing complex phenomena in terms compatible with our subject-object metaphysical (SOM) framework. But while these dualities have practical value, they actually confound our deeper understanding of physical reality. The best solution is the idea of the complementarity, where context-dependence is necessary to explain the observed phenomena. Even something as basic as m (mass) itself illustrates this…

The European Commission is set to unveil its Digital Omnibus package on Nov. 19, a sprawling reform effort pitched as a clean-up of Europe’s digital regulatory landscape.However, leaked drafts and consultations suggest the package may go far beyond tidying up. The Omnibus appears poised to amend core sections of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, relax limits around AI training, and soften some of the consent-centric features that defined Europe’s privacy approach for nearly a decade. For marketers, ad tech intermediaries, and publishers, this could mark the most meaningful shift in European privacy governance since GDPR took effect in 2018.…

This story by Wesley J. Smith is republished with the author’s permission from National Review. Freedom of religion is an internationally recognized fundamental human right. But in these increasingly secular times, efforts are ongoing to limit believers from living according to their faith outside of church, synagogue, mosque, or temple and home. In other words, religious freedom is being intentionally shriveled into a tepid and essentially toothless freedom of worship. Leading the Charge Canada is leading that charge and, in the process, becoming increasingly authoritarian. For example, even though the Canadian Charter explicitly guarantees “freedom of conscience and religion,” Ontario doctors with a religious…