Dear Bizarro Readers,

March is here. It’s true. I checked the calendar just to be sure. What does that mean? Well, it could mean a lot of different things, depending on where you are in the world and what you’re into. But if you’re reading this, then it means you’re ready to read about all of the latest cool happenings in the world of tech, AI, web dev, science, and other related topics.

We’ve got your monthly dose coming right up, but before we get into it, we also want to let you know that for at least the next two months you’ll be getting a bonus issue of Bizarro Devs in your inbox. That’s right, in addition to the usual first-Tuesday-of-the-month issue, we’ll also send you another one mid-month. Stay tuned for that, but for now, please enjoy the one before you.

Here are the top stories:

• 🤖🏆 ChatGPT Defeats Humans In Series of Thinking Tests

• 🌎🦹 Globetrotting Millennial Caught Selling $7M of Weapons Parts to Russia

• 🌐☠️ Generative AI Is Killing The Internet But We Can Save It

Let’s get started!

📰 From the Newsroom

🤖🏆 ChatGPT Defeats Humans In Series of Thinking Tests

A recent study from the University of Arkansas pitted ChatGPT-4 against 151 humans in a series of thinking tests. The tests were as follows:

• In the Alternative Uses Task, participants, including ChatGPT-4, were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for everyday objects, such as a rope or a fork. This test measured creativity by assessing the ability to think of a wide range of uses for a single object, showcasing flexibility in thinking.

• The Consequences Task invited participants to imagine the possible outcomes of hypothetical situations, like "what if humans no longer needed sleep?" This task measured the ability to foresee a variety of consequences and implications, highlighting original thought processes and the generation of unique solutions.

• During the Divergent Associations Task, participants were required to generate ten nouns that are as semantically distant from each other as possible. For example, while "dog" and "cat" are closely related, "cat" and "ontology" are far apart. This task measured the capacity to think across different contexts and draw connections between unrelated concepts.

When all of the results were tabulated, ChatGPT proved to be victorious over the humans. It provided more original and more elaborate responses. However, despite its impressive performance, the study did note AI's limitations, such as its lack of agency and the necessity for human interaction to unlock its creative potential.

🌎🦹 Globetrotting Millennial Caught Selling $7M of Weapons Parts to Russia

Less than a month ago, if you stumbled upon Kristina Puzyreva’s glamorous Instagram feed, you might have assumed she was a digital nomad. She looks like a typical young millennial who has been fortunate enough to travel the world and take beautiful photos of her adventures. As it turns out, she was fueling her lifestyle through a bit more of an unconventional - and very illegal - method.

• Last month, in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, Puzyreva admitted her involvement in a sophisticated operation aimed at illicitly supplying Russia with critical components for drones and missiles. She pled guilty to charges of money laundering. Her husband and another man are also pending trial as her co-conspirators.

• Investigators had a critical breakthrough in her case when authorities traced the serial numbers of newly manufactured U.S. semiconductors to recovered Russian weapons that had been deployed in Ukraine. The serial numbers matched those that were in equipment purchased by Puzyreva and her husband through shell companies.

• According to legal documents, at one point she created 80 different bank accounts to manage $3 million of illicitly obtained funds, reflecting the extensive measures she took to conceal her and her husband’s financial dealings.

Puzyreva's case subtly echoes the saga of Hushpuppi, an influencer who flaunted an extravagant lifestyle which was secretly funded by cybercrime. He was also eventually arrested and charged with money laundering and fraud. Though Puzyreva was nowhere near as popular as he was (2.8 million followers vs 799), there is still a faint parallel between how both of them portrayed themselves a certain way on Instagram, while privately living a life of crime.

🌐☠️ Generative AI Is Killing The Internet But We Can Save It

Our last story comes to us from a fellow SubStack newsletter called The Intrinsic Perspective. In the aptly titled "Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI," writer Erik Hoel prompts us to question not only the direction in which we're heading, but also the kind of digital legacy we wish to leave for future generations.

• Ever since ChatGPT’s release on November 30,2022, Generative AI has taken the internet by storm. Hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-based apps and products have flooded the marketplace in an attempt to get a piece of the AI Gold Rush.

• On the flip side, equally money hungry individuals have leveraged these AI tools to produce massive quantities of garbage content at an unprecedented scale. These range from websites filled with AI-generated articles, created solely for the purpose of ranking and getting clicks, to YouTube channels pumping out nonsensical children’s “educational” videos that are anything but educational.

• The problem is so pervasive that it’s not just shady actors participating in it, but well-known magazines, newspapers, and even scientific journals aren’t immune to the problem. Collectively, it sums up to what can accurately fall under the term “tragedy of the commons” - a term borrowed from the environmental movement of the 20th century.

So what’s the solution here? Hoel argues that it’s clear that we cannot simply leave this up to the AI companies themselves, since they are financially incentivized to not do anything about. He thinks that we need a "Clean Internet Act" to protect our digital commons. That sounds reasonable, but what would this legislation look like? Would it ban AI tools altogether, limit their use, or what? It’s a well-meaning, albeit tricky proposition to execute correctly.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• Despite passing through six human filters—three authors, an editor, and two reviewers—across multiple countries, a scientific journal had to retract a paper containing ludicrous AI-generated images, including an oversized rat penis, highlighting a comedic yet alarming lapse in academic scrutiny.

• Last week on Monday, Deutsche Telekom introduced an AI-powered, app-less smartphone concept at the MWC conference in Barcelona. With the introduction of this model, they predict that in the future apps will be obsolete and devices will use AI to perform tasks and provide services directly.

• Researchers have created AI worms that can spread from one system to another, and which can potentially steal data or deploy malware, thus exposing significant security vulnerabilities in the architecture of generative AI ecosystems.

• For all of the math aficionados out there who also love JavaScript, the folks over at RunJS have taken the 17 most important math equations that have shaped our world, and converted them into JavaScript - with fun explanations for each one.

• Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an investment scheme by a scammer group called Savvy Seahorse. The scammers have been using Facebook ads and a fake ChatGPT with WhatsApp bots to deceive users into transferring funds to Russian banks through bogus platforms branded with names like Tesla and Meta.

• Magic AI, supported by a $117 million investment led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, is developing an advanced code-generating AI aimed at functioning autonomously as a "superhuman software engineer," surpassing current tools like GitHub Copilot and potentially revolutionizing software development.

• NVIDIA has released "Chat with RTX.” It allows users to run a personalized chatbot directly on Windows RTX PCs for quick, private interactions without sharing data with third parties or requiring an internet connection.

• 📽️🎞️ GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon recently gave a presentation at FOSDEM 2024, where he highlighted the many useful and sometimes overlooked parts of git. He ended it with a Q&A session with the audience, which unearthed additional gems of knowledge.

• Learning how to make a Chrome extension enables you to use your coding skills to simplify tasks through Google Chrome’s extensive APIs. Check out this step-by-step guide and get started with it.

• If you are new to WordPress theme development, you may be wondering how to build a block theme. There are actually multiple ways to do it. Learn four different approaches in this tutorial.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"

– Homer Simpson

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $500 USD is about all it takes to manipulate an election in the U.S. these days. That’s the approximate total amount spent by a political consultant to influence 5,000 voters to stay home in the recent New Hampshire Democratic primary election.

• Over 96% of the top one million web pages had accessibility issues in 2023. The implications of this are way more far reaching than you might initially think. Just from an ecommerce perspective, 56% of people with disabilities cited accessibility as the reason for choosing one online store over another. If you run an online store, it might be time to check your accessibility score.

• 1,400 Apple employees who were working on Apple’s ambitious electric car project (dubbed "Project Titan") are currently in a limbo state after the company decided to abandon the project. Some will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, while the rest will have 90 days to find other roles within the company.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Heat.js: If you’ve been on the hunt for a great open-source heatmap tool, then Heat.js is worth checking out. It comes with zero dependencies and supports 51 languages. It’s also fully configurable, with options for custom triggers and flexible data breakdown. Export options include CSV, JSON, XML, and TXT, and you can import from JSON and TXT. Plus it offers 12 themes suitable for dark and light modes, configurable color ranges for views, and more!

https://www.william-troup.com/heat-js/

Husky: This is a tool designed to improve your git workflows by automatically linting commit messages, code, and running tests when you commit or push changes. It's lightweight, with no dependencies, and utilizes Git's core.hooksPath for modern, native git hook management. Husky supports cross-platform environments, including macOS, Linux, Windows, and is compatible with Git GUIs, node version managers, and various project structures like nested projects and monorepos. If you decide to try it, you’ll be in good company - it's widely used in over 1.3 million projects on GitHub.

https://typicode.github.io/husky/

🖼️ Image of The Month

The first prison photo of disgraced crypto financier Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has been released, courtesy of Tiffany Fong, an internet personality who interviewed SBF more than ten times while he was on house arrest awaiting trial for the crimes that he was eventually locked up for. Tiffany was able to secure an interview with a recently released former inmate who was housed with SBF, and he provided her with the photo.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition when you place it right above a screenshot of SBF with messieurs Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. We all have our up and down swings in life, but how many people’s pendulums have swung from sharing the stage with some of the most powerful men in the world to sharing a jail cell with gang members? That’s a pretty wild life trajectory.

💬 Word of The Month

"Kaizen" (改善), a Japanese concept, epitomizes the philosophy of continuous improvement in small, manageable steps.

In the spirit of Kaizen, we are reminded that progress doesn't always necessitate sweeping changes or monumental breakthroughs. Instead, it champions the value of persistence and the incremental advancements that, over time, lead to significant breakthroughs and efficiencies.

This philosophy underlines the importance of a growth mindset, where ongoing effort, adaptability, and a commitment to excellence drive the evolution of technology and its applications.

📰 Bizarro Job of The Month

If you live in the Oradell, New Jersey area in the U.S., and you’d like an unconventional job, then you’ll be pleased to know that Doggy Deuce Removal Service is currently hiring a Full-Time Yard Poop Scooper.

If hired, you’ll be expected to visit homes from 7:00am to 2:30pm and clean clients’ yards of all dog poop with tools provided by the company. You will work independently and report back to the office, and to the owner of the company every day.

No details in the job listing about what reporting will look like. Will it be a spreadsheet with a running poop count? A before and after photo of each turded area? A QR code attached to each specimen prior to disposal? I guess those questions can be answered during the job interview.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin