Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Link roundup

1. Unusually risky tattoo service:
The installation includes a 50-foot-long painting by him, at the center of which is a small hole, about four feet off the ground, with a chair in front of it. On a first-come-first-served basis, members of the public who so dare are invited to seat themselves in the chair for up to 90 minutes, their bare arm through the hole, while from the other side of the wall, Mr. Campbell tattoos on them whatever rendering he sees fit, knowing nothing about the subjects — even what they look like — and with zero input from them.
2. "On November 5, 2015, Google unveiled Smart Reply, a plug-in that reads and suggests responses to e-mails."
The early iterations of Smart Reply were overly affectionate. “I love you” was the machine’s most common suggested response. This was a touch awkward: because the model has no knowledge of the relationship between an e-mail’s sender and its receiver, it provides the same suggested responses whether you are corresponding with your boss or a long-lost sibling. “The team was really puzzled about this,” Gawley said. “It turns out that our internal testers are very affectionate and that ‘I love you’ is a very common thing for people at Google to say.”
3. Twitter feed dedicated to Riker's Google searches.

4. Fallout 4 figures available for preorder.