Author: Geek Planet

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…

One of the biggest challenges with using AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is that you don’t know the inner workings. You have a vague idea of what the result is going to look like, based on your instructions, but no idea how the AI chatbot mustered it. And as you go from single to multi-step tasks, the situation gets trickier. This is where Skills come into the picture.  What’s the big shift Think of skills as a set of instructions that can be executed, or applied, with a single word. Claude-maker Anthropic recently introduced Agent skills, an open standard…

Generative AI has dominated the tech news over the last two years. More than 50% of venture capital funding goes to generative AI, which I distinguish from predictive AI, the older and, at one time, the more researched form of AI. Announcements and news from the big consulting firms and top business schools are also dominated by generative AI. The profit figures suggest that they are the most profitable organizations within AI outside of Nvidia. Nirvana, doomsday or — bubble Bubbles 1 Adobe Stock licensed Much of the AI discourse in the media was previously split between nirvana, doomsday and…

Media buyers tend to wince when LinkedIn comes up. The platform’s ad prices have climbed steadily this year, pushing into levels that make even seasoned planners pause. Inside LinkedIn, the view is different. A senior executive there framed the premium as the cost of access to what the company sees as one of the strongest data and intent signals in digital advertising.“Clicks don’t pay the bills, pipeline quality does,” said LinkedIn’s head of ads measurement Jae Oh.  To compare, the average annual CPM rate (as of Oct. 31, 2025) on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is $5.46, TikTok is $4.66, YouTube…

I am something of a Gary Marcus fan. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is not. Gary Marcus is a psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author. But, more recently, he is best known for his criticisms of Silicon Valley’s love affair with generative AI and LLMs (Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT) which he shares on his Substack. Marcus believes that, someday, we will achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (though I disagree). But he insists that LLMs, while useful (to some extent), cannot, by virtue of what they are underneath, get there. His criticisms derive largely from their statistical basis, lack of semantic…