All posts tagged: Unstoppable

From beef noodles to bots: Taiwan’s factcheckers on fighting Chinese disinformation and ‘unstoppable’ AI | Taiwan

From beef noodles to bots: Taiwan’s factcheckers on fighting Chinese disinformation and ‘unstoppable’ AI | Taiwan

Published by skeptic

Charles Yeh’s battle with disinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law started picking the green onions out of her food. Asked what she was doing, she explained that onions can harm your liver. She knew this, she said, because she had received text messages telling her so. Yeh was puzzled by this. His family had always happily eaten green onions. So he decided to set the record straight. He put the truth in a blog post and circulated it among family and friends through the messaging app Line. They shared it more broadly, and soon he received requests from strangers asking to be connected to his personal Line account. “There wasn’t much of a factchecking concept in Taiwan then, but I realised there was a demand. I could also help resolve people’s problems,” Yeh said. So he continued, and in 2015 launched the website MyGoPen, which means, “don’t be fooled again” in Taiwanese. Within two years, …

12 Tiny Habits Of Unbothered People That Make Them Absolutely Unstoppable

12 Tiny Habits Of Unbothered People That Make Them Absolutely Unstoppable

Published by skeptic

They say the best version of revenge is living well. If there’s anyone who you want to make jealous, you have to lean into caring a little less — not in a way that makes you callous, but in a way that makes you come off as cool, calm, and collected. Here are 12 tiny habits of ‘unbothered’ people that make them unstoppable: 1. Don’t say more than necessary. Practice listening more than you speak, and you might discover that people share more about themselves than you asked for. A major part of being a good listener is staying open to what someone is telling you. By removing distractions and focusing fully on the person you’re in conversation with, you’re priming yourself to be a good listener. Another hallmark of a good listener is someone who asks specific questions and affirms the person they’re talking to. RELATED: 11 Little Habits Of The Most Well-Liked People 2. Don’t get overpowered by your emotions. We all react emotionally at times, but letting your emotions rule your life is a pathway …

Have the Houthis Become Unstoppable?

Have the Houthis Become Unstoppable?

Published by skeptic

The Leader is a man of about 40, with a smooth, youthful face and a thin beard and mustache. In televised speeches, he wears a blazer with a shawl over his shoulders, his dark eyes menacing and humorless. Apart from that, so little is known about him that he might as well be a phantom. He has no birth certificate or passport and is said to have spent his formative years living in caves. No foreign diplomat has ever met him in person. He presides over a starving, brutalized people in northern Yemen and has sent an armada of child soldiers to their deaths. In January, one of his courts condemned nine men to be executed for homosexual behavior—seven by stoning, two by crucifixion. Yet Abdulmalik al-Houthi may now be the most popular public figure in the Middle East. Ever since his soldiers began attacking and boarding commercial ships in the Red Sea in November—ostensibly in defense of Palestine—he has been treated like a latter-day Che Guevara, his portrait and speeches shared on social media …

Never believe Putin is unstoppable – after Navalny, this is how a new global opposition can bring him down | Masha Alekhina, Pussy Riot

Never believe Putin is unstoppable – after Navalny, this is how a new global opposition can bring him down | Masha Alekhina, Pussy Riot

Published by skeptic

Alexei Navalny was one of the first to come out in support of Pussy Riot after our arrest in 2012. His birthday congratulations telegram arrived at my prison faster than anyone else’s. Laughing at enemies, loving life, he was full of vitality. On 16 February, he was killed in the Polar Wolf penal colony north of the Arctic Circle. The loudest, clearest and brightest voice against Vladimir Putin’s regime has been murdered, despicably, out of sight. Before his murder, he was tortured for three years; a third of this time was spent in solitary confinement without proper food and clothing. Navalny was killed a month before the so-called “elections”. Putin killed him, just as he killed Boris Nemtsov. He killed both out of envy – envy for the people’s love, which he, a petty tyrant from the KGB, will never enjoy. It is meant as a signal – we killed the most famous of you, so now it’s not a problem to kill every political prisoner in Russia, one by one – every one of …

Vladimir Putin, riding high before Navalny’s death, seems unstoppable

Vladimir Putin, riding high before Navalny’s death, seems unstoppable

Published by skeptic

When Russian prison authorities announced the death of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most potent political opponent, the Russian president appeared to be overflowing with cheer. Addressing a group of workers and students at a machinery plant in the Russian industrial city of Chelyabinsk on Friday, a smiling Putin, unsurprisingly, made no mention of Navalny’s death in a faraway Arctic prison and instead professed himself to be satisfied at the technological progress he had just seen. “Forward! Success! To new borders!” Putin declared to one young worker who had proclaimed her admiration for the president. With Navalny’s demise at age 47, further military assistance for Ukraine still blocked in Congress and Ukrainian forces retreating on the battlefield, a lot seems to be going Putin’s way, a month ahead of a presidential election in Russia that he is certain to win. Before the trip to Chelyabinsk, Putin was already riding high off an obsequious interview last week with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Even sanctions imposed by “our quasi-partners,” Putin boasted Friday, had resulted in a …

Donald Trump Looks Unstoppable With New Hampshire Primary Win

Donald Trump Looks Unstoppable With New Hampshire Primary Win

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire primary, narrowing Nikki Haley’s path to the nomination and further underscoring his dominance of the Republican Party. The Associated Press called the race shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. Haley had bet big on New Hampshire, hoping that a “strong” performance in the second contest of the GOP primary could build enough momentum to mount a serious challenge to Trump. Her hopes got higher after Ron DeSantis, who had finished ahead of her in the Iowa caucus but still about thirty points behind the frontrunner, suspended his campaign—pitting Haley against her former boss in a head-to-head matchup between “one lady and one fella.” “May the best woman win,” Haley quipped after his Sunday exit. A Haley victory wasn’t in the cards, though, and Trump once again showcased his stranglehold on the GOP—despite his two impeachments, 91 criminal charges, authoritarian agenda, and questions about his fitness for office. Indeed, Haley, a more traditional conservative, has run a campaign premised on restoring the party to its pre-Trump state. But …

The Bear Sure Looks Like an Unstoppable Award-Winning Machine

The Bear Sure Looks Like an Unstoppable Award-Winning Machine

Published by skeptic

We know it sounds crazy, but the 2024 Emmys, airing on FOX on January 15, are the first opportunity the FX series The Bear had had to win any Emmy Awards. A surprise success when it premiered in June of 2022, the series created by Christopher Storer earned Golden Globe, Critics Choice, and SAG Awards for star Jeremy Allen White in early 2023. But thanks to the quirks of Emmy eligibility, it wasn’t even nominated for TVs highest honor until July of 2023, after it second season had premiered. And when the Emmys were delayed to January during the SAG-AFTRA strike, it meant that nearly a year and a half would transpire between The Bear’s premiere and its Emmy moment.  But hey, look: we made it! And with The Bear having won four Emmys already — for casting, sound mixing and editing, and picture editing — it’s heading into Monday’s ceremony with incredible momentum behind it. During the Golden Globes last Sunday, White won his second award in a row, while co-star Ayo Edebiri won …

Why Facial Recognition May Be Unstoppable

Why Facial Recognition May Be Unstoppable

Published by skeptic

Facial recognition was a late-blooming technology: It went through 40 years of floundering before it finally matured. At the 1970 Japan World Exposition, a primitive computer tried—mostly in vain—to match visitors with their celebrity look-alikes. In 2001, the first-ever “smart” facial-recognition surveillance system was deployed by the police department in Tampa, Florida, where it failed to make any identifications that led to arrests. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2011, an Intel employee tried to demonstrate a camera system that could distinguish male faces from female ones. A woman with shoulder-length red hair came up from the audience. The computer rendered its verdict: male. Facial recognition was hard, for two reasons. Teaching a computer to perceive a human face was trouble enough. But matching that face to the person’s identity in a database was plainly fanciful—it required significant computing power, and quantities of photographs tied to accurate data. This prevented widespread adoption, because matching was always going to be where the money was. In place of facial-recognition technology (FRT), other biometrics, such as fingerprinting …