the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Hey Cany,
Did you check Jenns tickets ?
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You gotta be F-ing kidding me!!! PT Barnum was correct, there's a sucker born every minute!!! Can't wait to read about how many people lost millions when the Metaverse Real Estate Market crashed!!

The Next Hot Housing Market Is Out of This World. It’s in the Metaverse.​

Despite the implosion of FTX and projections of a cryptocurrency winter, the metaverse real estate market is expected to grow by $5.37 billion by 2026.

In March, Gabe Sierra, a contractor whose family has been in the construction business for more than 30 years, will take offers for his latest creation: an 11,000-square-foot mansion with seven bedrooms and a pool in Pinecrest, Miami.

To sweeten the deal, he’s throwing in the exact same house and a King Kong-size, bright green gorilla that scales downtown skyscrapers and stalks the streets of South Florida.

The twin home is in the metaverse — a catchall phrase for the growing conglomerate of immersive digital worlds where avatars work, play and purchase goods. Pixelated parcels of land are being bought, sold and built upon in a market now worth $1.4 billion, making the metaverse a new frontier for real estate builders and investors.

Mr. Sierra, an avid gamer who uses a purple gorilla as one of his own avatars, paid $10,000 for a digital parcel in an online world called the Sandbox, and then partnered with Voxel Architects, an architecture firm specializing in virtual 3-D properties, to build the digital home to pair with the real thing. It all hits the auction block in March, and he’s hoping for a sale price of around $10 million.

“It’s a project that blends the line between physical and digital to the furthest extent that I could on a residential home,” Mr. Sierra said of the house, called Meta Residence One. “It pairs a real-world build and expands on it in the digital space. As these technologies get more immersive, it’s going to make a lot more sense.”

Much like real-world real estate, where pricing fluctuates according to the principle of supply and demand, metaverse real estate also operates on a fixed scale. The internet itself may be boundless, but most virtual gaming universes have already been sliced and diced into a set number of parcels, meaning as the number of buyers increases, prices go up as well.

Financial transactions in the metaverse are handled in cryptocurrency and powered by the blockchain — a digitally distributed public ledger that eliminates the need for a third party like a bank. Despite the implosion of FTX and projections of a crypto winter, the metaverse real estate market is expected to grow by $5.37 billion by 2026.

In the Sandbox, one of the most popular metaverse worlds and where Mr. Sierra made his $10,000 purchase, much of the virtual land rush has been at the hands of global corporations like Adidas, Atari and Warner Music Group, who have bought spaces to create entertainment, sell goods, launch virtual headquarters and host immersive gatherings for employees and fans.

Last year, the total value of land in The Sandbox, which is sold via a nonfungible token, or NFT, was estimated to be $167 million. And while land purchased directly from the Sandbox goes for about $400 a parcel, there’s an active secondary market where prices can be many times that. Proximity to land owned by celebrities and big-name brands drives up prices, too: After Snoop Dogg purchased parcels in the Sandbox and christened them “Snoopverse,” one buyer paid $450,000 just to become his neighbor.

“Land is becoming the infrastructure of the metaverse,” said Sebastien Borget, the Sandbox’s co-founder. “In this ecosystem, there are actors that are developing and offering services for people to find the right land, buy the right land and understand the value of that land.”

The metaverse has been around since 2003, when Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world platform, came onto the scene. But virtual real estate didn’t truly take off until late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media platform formerly known as Facebook would now be called Meta, placing a hyper-public bet on the future of the next digital frontier.

Since then, land sales in the metaverse have climbed into the seven figures, including a virtual estate purchased for $2.4 million in November 2021 in Decentraland and another for $1.65 million in Otherside in May 2022.

And now, in addition to billboards and burger joints for avatars, homes are being constructed on these parcels of land. They don’t offer shelter or a place to sleep. But they do offer our increasingly online selves a place to gather — and show off.

“Buying a piece of real estate for a residential purpose in the metaverse is a kind of prestige,” said Kristi Waterworth, a journalist and contributing analyst for The Motley Fool who writes regularly on metaverse real estate.

It’s also a chance to bend the rules of physics. Everyrealm, a metaverse technology and infrastructure company, partnered with artists including Misha Khan and Daniel Arsham to create the Row, a futuristic collection of digital homes marked by melting, Salvador Dali-esque angles and dreamlike floating spheres. The homes premiered at Art Basel in an immersive exhibit and are not yet for sale, but Janine Yorio, Everyrealm’s chief executive, says she anticipates each will sell for about $75,000.

Buyers will receive a certificate of authenticity as well as 3-D models of their home, and then be able to place it on a plot of land in the online gaming world of their choice.

“We called upon a bunch of cultural references, one of which was the idea of a Sears home, when back at the turn of the century you could buy plans for a home and then build it anywhere from New York City to Des Moines,” Ms. Yorio said.

Some online worlds present a digital map of the earth, allowing buyers to purchase places or coordinates that hold sentimental or historic value. T.J. Brisbois, 37, a real estate investor in Detroit, owns about a dozen land parcels in Motor City, but not on Earth — in the Detroit of Upland, a gaming portal mapped to the real world. He buys them, marks them up and resells them. He estimates he’s made a 10 percent return on his money since he started in 2022.

His purchases, he said, are just an extension of his business in the real world.

“I didn’t really get it until I got into it, and I was willing to put in a few real-world dollars,” Mr. Brisbois said. “It’s important for people that are in real estate, because there’s real opportunity here.”

Buyers concerned about real estate taxes on virtual real estate can breathe easy, said Mike O’Brien, who heads up the Web3 and Digital Assets team at Ernst & Young. Though tax law on virtual real estate is evolving, “we have yet to see property taxes on real estate that would be issued by a government,” he said, adding that indirect taxes such as consumer taxes, sales tax and gain considerations do often apply.

Mr. O’Brien is the owner of digital real estate — in Superworld, another digital world mapped over earth. He recently purchased the parcel of New York City land that is home to the bar where he met his wife.
Brick and mortar home builders are also tapping into the metaverse for opportunities to reach new customers. In January, KB Home, one of the largest homebuilders in the United States, cut the ribbon on a community in Decentraland, where potential buyers can enter, explore and toy with customization options on three of their model homes.

Buyers can swap out everything from countertop materials to overall architectural style. The move, said Amit Desai, KB Home’s chief marketing officer, is a natural outgrowth of the virtual walk-through options that have increased since 2020.

“Even before the pandemic, we were on this path of providing enhanced digital tools, but the pandemic accelerated the need for us to really allow prospective home buyers to search for a home from the comfort of their current homes,” Mr. Desai said. “The metaverse is just a nice extension of that.”
 
what? who? where?

www.yahoo.com

Highly Intelligent and Possibly Invincible Super Pigs Are Invading America

A special breed of highly intelligent super pigs from Canada have started to travel south into the northern United States. Here's what we know.
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com

:oops:

Highly Intelligent and Possibly Invincible Super Pigs Are Invading America​


  • A special breed of hybrid super pigs from Canada have started to travel south into the northern United States.
  • The pigs pose a threat to native wildlife and may prove tough to eradicate.
  • The spread of the pigs has only increased in recent years.
A hybrid breed of super pigs—a mix of a domestic pig and a wild boar—is running wild in Canada. And now they have their sights set on the United States.

Originally crossbred to help farmed pigs grow larger and tolerate the cold temperatures of Canada, a drop in the market about two decades ago led some farmers to let their hybrid pigs run free. Now they’re running very free, according to Field and Stream. The super pigs are coming south, likely heading to Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan.

“Wild hogs feed on anything. They gobble up tons and tons of goslings and ducklings in the spring. They can take down a whitetail deer, even an adult. Originally, it was like ‘wow, this is something we can hunt.’ But it’s become clear that they’re threatening our whitetail deer, elk, and especially, waterfowl. Not to mention the crop damage. The downsides outweigh any benefit wild hogs may have as a huntable species.”

The best strategy at reigning in the super pigs has been employing the Judas Pig concept, which straps a GPS collar onto a pig to lead game officials to other pigs. Deception may be our only hope.

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wader said:

The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life​

AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine.​

SAN FRANCISCO — Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ,” he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.

As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.

Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”
Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”


:oops:
Click to expand...
Daisy, Daisy
Give me your answer do
I'm half crazy
All for the love of you
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two...
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There goes the morning Poppy or Everything Bagel!!!

Service Members Told to Avoid Poppy Seeds Because of Drug Test Effects​

The Defense Department has instructed service members that some poppy seeds can cause drug tests to come back as false positives.

The Defense Department has advised service members to avoid eating poppy seeds because officials are concerned they could cause misleading drug test results.

The warning reflects longstanding concerns that people who eat a poppy seed bagel or lemon poppy seed loaf sometimes have drug tests come back positive for codeine or morphine, even if they are not using the drugs.

The Defense Department’s under secretary for personnel and readiness, Gilbert R. Cisneros Jr., issued a memorandum last week directing military departments to advise service members to avoid foods and baked goods containing the seeds out of an “abundance of caution.”

Mr. Cisneros acknowledged that the concerns about poppy seeds were “not new.” He said the department’s thresholds for a positive drug test aimed to distinguish morphine and codeine use from poppy seed ingestion.

But recent data had suggested that some poppy seed varieties contained a level of codeine contamination that made it more difficult to identify whether a positive drug test result was from drug use, Mr. Cisneros said.

Poppy seeds do not contain opiates, but when they are harvested, they can be contaminated by the morphine, codeine and thebaine that are in a fluid that oozes from the plant.

How much of these opiates winds up on seeds sold in grocery stores or in muffins bought at bakeries varies widely, researchers said.

Michelle Carlin, an assistant professor of toxicology and forensic chemistry at Rutgers University, said she had analyzed bags of poppy seeds from different grocery stores and found that “even within the same bag, there’s a big variation in the amount of morphine, codeine and thebaine.”

A variety of factors affect these levels, including where in the field the poppies were grown and how much sunshine and water was in that area, Dr. Carlin said.

To minimize opiate contamination, seeds are supposed to be washed and processed, but that does not always happen. Some seeds are also sold unwashed for people seeking illicit access to opiates without a prescription. The F.D.A. said in a statement that there was no requirement for poppy seeds to be washed before being sold, but “manufacturers are required to ensure that food is safe for consumption.”

“In general, when poppy seeds come to America, they’re meant to be washed away of all that morphine and codeine,” said Madeleine Swortwood, an associate professor in forensic science at Sam Houston State University. “And several years ago, we found that there were companies that were importing unwashed poppy seeds, and the unwashed poppy seeds then inherently have lots of morphine and codeine on them.”

All these factors mean that “the concentration of these opioids in the poppy seed varies quite a lot,” said Marta Concheiro-Guisan, assistant professor of toxicology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
And that can lead to a positive drug test, even if the bagel or cake that caused the positive result did not affect the consumer.

That poppy seeds can create misleading drug test results has been known for decades. In a 1996 episode of “Seinfeld,” Elaine Benes lost her job after a positive drug test caused by a poppy seed muffin.
The people who interpret routine drug tests look for a certain ratio of morphine and codeine that typically indicates a positive result is caused by poppy seeds, not drug use. But the Defense Department memorandum noted that “recent data” suggested poppy seeds could show a higher amount of codeine than previously expected.

Dr. Concheiro-Guisan said she had also observed this change in recent reports. “It’s getting very tricky,” she said.

For people who are not in the military but have an upcoming drug test, all three experts interviewed said they should definitely avoid poppy seeds for a few days, if not weeks or months, before the test.
 
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