If you're in need of a short brain break, you can play with this piece of virtual bubble wrap.
Each time you "pop" a bubble, it multiplies into little bubbles. You can press these to get even more, tinier bubbles. — Read the rest
In this Simone Giertz video, she builds a secret messages box where your confessions, overshares, rants, love letters, etc. are only readable for a few seconds after the box is open and before they're shred.
Simone builds the box in response to thoughts that she might overshare her feelings and sometimes end up making people feel uncomfortable. — Read the rest
Simone Giertz's latest crazy challenge to herself was to make a robotic arm entirely out of stained glass. She got close. One of the more stress-prone components kept breaking. In the end, out of frustration, she decided to fabricate that one piece from metal. — Read the rest
In 2018, in anticipation of Tesla's Cybertruck announcement (remember how that went?), comedic maker, Simone Giertz, did a project that went global. She took a Tesla Model 3 and converted it into the world's first Tesla truck, dubbed Truckla.
You may have wondered over the years what happened to Truckla (I did). — Read the rest
Many Boing Boing readers are likely familiar with science and physics educator, Dianna Cowern, aka YouTube's Physics Girl. With nearly 3 million subscribers, Dianna is beloved for her exuberant personality and her clear and entertaining explanations of complex physics concepts and her love for all things science. — Read the rest
Becky Stern has posted a great list of female makers on YouTube and she is encouraging others to suggest additions to the list.
The latest bizarre invention from Simone Giertz, the woman once known as "The Queen of Shitty Robots," involves a basic MIDI keyboard and a bunch of those creepy plastic wind-up teeth. The goal was to kind-of try to make each tooth-chatter correspond to a different pitch, so as to actually produce something that sounds sort of musical. — Read the rest
I'm loving these 'my favorite tools' videos from the all-new ADAM SAVAGE's TESTED.
Machine learning systems are notorious for cheating, and there's a whole menagerie of ways that these systems achieve their notional goals while subverting their own purpose, with names like "model stealing, rewarding hacking and poisoning attacks."
A team of researchers from Microsoft and Harvard's Berkman Center have published a taxonomy of "Failure Modes in Machine Learning," broken down into "Intentionally-Motivated Failures" and "Unintended Failures."
Master maker Simone Giertz and her friends transformed her Tesla Model 3 into an electric pickup truck. Their fake TV commercial is above; build video below. TRUCKLA: Available nowhere. Now.
Is there anything Adam Savage can't build?
His new Discovery TV show attempts to answer the riddle.
John Cog writes, "Inventor extraordinaire Simone Giertz (YouTube's 'Queen of Shitty Robots') (previously) is already planning funny new experiments for that 'weird radiation mask' that 'looks like something from like a low-budget sci-fi' that she'll be wearing for her next six weeks of new radiation therapy for a non-cancerous (but scary) brain tumor (previously). — Read the rest
Look, I'm as delighted as you are to see Alex Jones' ability to spread hatred curtailed — because in a world where all the important speech takes place online, and where online speech is owned by four or five companies, being kicked off of Big Tech's services is likely to be an extinction-level event.
Simone Giertz is the beloved creator of a series of Shitty Robots, and now she's working at longer lengths, having created hilariously profane, shitty-robot-themed show about vegetarianism and robots, which culminates in the construction, stalking, killing and eating of a tofu-impregnated robot that she and Adam Savage built. — Read the rest
Robot law pioneer Ryan Calo (previously) has published a "roadmap" for an "artificial intelligence policy…to help policymakers, investors, technologists, scholars, and students understand the contemporary policy environment around AI at least well enough to initiative their own exploration."
Simone Giertz—who previously made her own space program—has now moved on to inventing her own personal, portable mattress.
Eminent computer scientist Ed Felten has posted a short, extremely useful taxonomy of four ways that an algorithm can fail to be accountable to the people whose lives it affects: it can be protected by claims of confidentiality ("how it works is a trade secret"); by complexity ("you wouldn't understand how it works"); unreasonableness ("we consider factors supported by data, even when you there's no obvious correlation"); and injustice ("it seems impossible to explain how the algorithm is consistent with law or ethics").
Trump launched his campaign in front of an "audience" of actors paid $50/each to wear campaign shirts and cheer wildly, and he's brought his paid cheering section with him into the presidency, bringing along staffers to applaud at key moments during his press conferences and other appearances.
Concrete Problems in AI Safety, an excellent, eminently readable paper from a group of Google AI researchers and some colleagues, sets out five hard problems facing the field: robots might damage their environments to attain their goals; robots might figure out how to cheat to attain their goals; supervising robots all the time is inefficient; robots that are allowed to try novel strategies might cause disasters; and robots that are good at one task might inappropriately try to apply that expertise to another unrelated task. — Read the rest
