Issue 161

🤖👮 Atlanta prison introduces 6-foot tall AI-powered robot guards. Meta's blood money: how Facebook turns tragedy into profit. OpenAI safety expert quits: "We're not ready for what's coming."

Happy November!

Welcome to the latest issue of Bizarro Devs. As usual, we’ve got an interesting lineup of stories for you this month - including a truly bizarre tale involving dairy products. The Numbers Game section features what is probably the largest single number that has ever been featured in that section, and of course we’ve got some helpful tools as well. Are you ready?

Let’s get started!

• 🤖👮 Atlanta Prison Introduces 6-Foot Tall AI-Powered Robot Guards

• 🔪💸 Meta's Blood Money: How Facebook Turns Tragedy Into Profit

• 😱💣 OpenAI Safety Expert Quits: "We're Not Ready for What's Coming"

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📰 From the Newsroom

🤖👮 Atlanta Prison Introduces 6-Foot Tall AI-Powered Robot Guards

Remember the 2013 Matt Damon film Elysium featuring robot police? Fast forward to 2024 and robot police are no longer a sci-fi film plot device but a feature of real-life. Prison life that is. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia is deploying DEKA Sentry Robots to conduct perimeter patrols and security rounds in their facility.

• Standing at around six feet tall, the robots have advanced capabilities like 360-degree cameras, heat detection, and night vision.

• They navigate autonomously, but remain under human oversight for complex tasks, using AI to detect potential issues and alert human deputies.

• This is the first such robot experiment of its kind in the U.S. and will run for 90 days as a pilot program. After that it will be evaluated to determine if it should continue.

The initiative comes at no initial cost to the department, with Sheriff Craig Owens highlighting an unexpected perk: unlike human officers, the robots never call in sick or request vacation time. As correctional facilities across the U.S. watch this pioneering program, it’ll be interesting to see if others follow suit.

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🔪💸 Meta's Blood Money: How Facebook Turns Tragedy Into Profit

In an eye-opening investigation by CalMatters and The Markup, researchers have uncovered how Meta, Facebook's parent company, monetizes political violence and tragic events through its advertising platform. The company publicly denounces violence, but the CalMatters / Markup report reveals a pattern of significant revenue generation from ads related to violent political events.

• After Donald Trump's assassination attempt in July, Meta earned between $593,000 and $813,000 from ads explicitly mentioning the incident, with merchandise ranging from coffee mugs to Hawaiian shirts featuring images of Trump post-shooting.

• Following the October 7th event in Israel / Palestine, Meta's revenue from Israel-related political ads skyrocketed by 450% compared to the previous year, bringing in between $14.8 and $22.1 million dollars in just a few months.

• One clothing company, Red First, spent between $473,000 and $798,000 on assassination-related ads alone in just 10 weeks, demonstrating how tragedy can become a business opportunity on Meta's platform.

While Meta argues that advertisers naturally respond to current events, the company's ability to generate substantial revenue from political violence raises concerns about the incentive structures built into our digital ecosystem. Should tech platforms be allowed to profit from human suffering, or do we need stronger regulations to prevent the commodification of tragedy? What do you think?

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😱💣 OpenAI Safety Expert Quits: "We're Not Ready for What's Coming"

In a candid departure announcement, Miles Brundage, OpenAI's Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness, has revealed concerning insights about the state of artificial general intelligence (AGI) development. After six years in various leadership roles at one of AI's most prominent companies, Brundage is stepping away from his "dream job" - a decision that partially stems from his growing concerns about the industry's preparedness for increasingly powerful AI systems.

• In a striking admission, Brundage declares that neither OpenAI nor any other frontier AI lab is ready for AGI development, and more worryingly, neither is the world at large - suggesting we're racing toward a future we're not prepared to handle.

• Dozens of companies will soon possess AI systems capable of posing catastrophic risks, yet Brundage notes that we don’t have much time to establish the necessary regulatory frameworks and safety measures to manage these technologies.

• His solution? Leaving the industry entirely to start a nonprofit focused on AI policy and advocacy, believing that meaningful change requires independent voices free from corporate constraints and conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in joining Brundage’s future non-profit, he’s looking for individuals with backgrounds in nonprofit management, economics, international relations, public policy, as well as AI researchers and engineers. Even those with strong research and writing skills who are interested in research assistant positions are encouraged to fill out his form.

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⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Pinata: Add file uploads and retrieval in minutes so you can focus on your app. The easiest File API on the internet.

• Python is now the most used language on GitHub - overtaking JavaScript - as global open source activity continues to extend beyond traditional software development.

• Nucleus Genomics is a Brooklyn-based startup that provides a whole genome sequence and analysis service for $399. It takes six weeks to get the results, which contain information about any variants in your genome and how those variants could impact your health.

• A 15-year court battle between a UK couple and Google just came to an end. The European Court of Justice (the EU's Supreme Court) sided with the couple and ruled that Google must pay a £2.4 billion fine for market abuse.

• From Beijing to New York in two-ish hours? China’s new supersonic passenger jet prototype claims that it’s possible. The company behind it - Lingkong Tianxing Technology - announced a successful test flight that hit Mach 4 speeds.

• As AI tools get increasingly better at coding, more people have been wondering if there’s a future out there for junior developers. Here’s the thing: while AI might be useful, there are still many benefits that junior developers bring to the table that AI cannot replicate.

• GitHub data protection has been a hot topic among developers on platforms like Reddit, X, and HackerNews. Here are ten great tips for conducting an effective GitHub backup so that your data stays secure. While you’re at it, check out this Git commands cheatsheet.

• In probably the most direct power move by OpenAI against Google, the AI giant just released a new search feature for paid ChatGPT users. Although ChatGPT has been able to access the web for more than a year now, this is an entirely different experience and closer to what you get with Perplexity AI.

• 📽️🎞️ Check out the latest video of Atlas, the humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics. In this clip, Atlas performs a rather mundane task. It’s not exactly “exciting” to watch. The exciting part is knowing that what Atlas is doing is autonomous. That, and the way he moves his body is uniquely not human.

• Thinking about getting into PHP testing but not sure where to start? Check out this friendly intro to PHP testing guide as a primer on the topic.

• If you use WordPress, then you probably already know that you can easily add a background image to your posts by using the cover block. But did you know that it’s just as easy to add the parallax effect to the cover block too?

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🎤 It’s How They Said It

"There is no substantive evidence that Einstein wrote or spoke this statement."

– Garson O’Toole (real name: Gregory Sullivan), who runs Quote Investigator - a website dedicated to tracing the earliest verifiable usage of attributable quotes. Einstein happens to be one of the most misquoted people on the internet.

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🧮 The Numbers Game

• $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 USD is how much a Russian court fined Google recently. I’m 99% sure that not a single one of you reading this - unless you already read this story - know the word for this number. It’s decillion, which is a 20 with 33 zeros after it. Paying off the fine could take Google 56.65 septillion years, which is more than 4 trillion times the age of the universe.

• $29,900,000 USD is the profit Reddit reported this past quarter, marking its first as a publicly traded company. Its new AI translation feature along with AI training deals with Google and OpenAI significantly boosted revenue to $348.4 million - a 68% increase from the previous year. Following the announcement, Reddit's shares rose more than 35%.

• $0.75 USD is all it costs to execute a successful phone scam using OpenAI's Realtime API, as found by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Despite OpenAI's safety protocols, including monitoring and human review, the ease of scripting AI agents - requiring only 1,051 lines of code - has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for phone scamming at scale.

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⚒️ Tools and Resources

Vizzu: This free, open-source Javascript/C++ library uses a generic dataviz engine that generates many types of charts and seamlessly animates between them. You can use it to create static charts too, but its ability to build animated data stories and interactive explorers is the real standout feature. It lets you showcase your data from multiple perspectives and your viewers can easily follow along because of the animations.

https://lib.vizzuhq.com/latest/

Faker: This helpful development tool is freely available to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes under the MIT license. It lets you generate massive amounts of fake (but realistic) data for testing and development purposes. You can generate names, genders, bios, job titles, addresses, street names, countries, account details, transactions, prices, product names, descriptions, and more.

https://fakerjs.dev/

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🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

If you’re thinking to yourself…that’s a piece of cheese…

…then you’d be right.

It is, in fact, a piece of cheese. But it’s not just any cheese. It’s one of three highly sought after cheddar cheeses produced in England.

Okay, so it’s some cheddar cheese. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that a London cheese specialist called Neal’s Yard Dairy just had £300,000 worth of these three cheeses stolen in an apparent “cheese heist.”

Yes, a cheese heist. Never in my wildest imagination would I have ever thought that stealing cheese was a thing. Someone needs to make a movie about this ASAP. Forget precious jewels, priceless works of art, or cold hard cash. We need an Ocean’s 11 style movie about stealing cheese. Imagine Clooney and Pitt with their dry humor dialogue going back and forth about cheese? I would absolutely watch that.

All jokes aside, I hope the stolen cheese is recovered. Thus far, police have managed to arrest and question one man. He was released on bail and the investigation continues.

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💬 What’s the Word?

"Googol" (English) is the word given to the second highest possible number that we have a word for. It is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta and inspired the founders of Google, who were looking for a name that would reflect their mission to organize an immense amount of information on the web. A misspelling of "googol" eventually led to the name "Google," and it stuck as the official company name.

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📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

In one of last month’s featured stories, we looked at research out of California that showed that humans have two significant aging milestones - around the mid-40s and 60. It was surprising in the sense that it questioned our assumption about aging, namely that it’s more gradual.

I agree with the majority vote here. I was also surprised, but I do think that follow-up studies need to be done to really give me more confidence in the conclusions.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin