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Thomas Smith

(He/Him)
San Francisco
As seen in: Bay Area Telegraph, Elemental, Forge, Medium, OneZero, The Startup, IEEE Spectrum, SFGate, Substack, Flipboard, YourTango and
Covers:  Technology, food, travel, AI, and the San Francisco Bay Area
Award-winning, Johns Hopkins trained AI expert with 14 years experience. "A Veteran Programmer" - @nytimes. AI consultant, photographer and YouTuber.
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Bay Area squirrels are splooting and it's freaking people out

Bay Area squirrels are splooting and it's freaking people out

SFGate — If you looked out your front window and saw a squirrel stretched out spread-eagle and motionless on your lawn, you'd likely think it met some untimely end. Really, though, it's probably just splooting. With temperatures soaring above 105 degrees in many parts of the Bay Area during this record-breaking heat wave, lots of people have noticed squirrels exhibiting this strange behavior.
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Don't Take Our Kodachrome Away

Don't Take Our Kodachrome Away

digitalrev.com — The 19th and 20th centuries saw a dizzying array of photographic technologies, from the daguerreotypes that launched modern photography (and used toxic chemicals combined with polished sheets of silver to capture images) to tintypes, cyanotypes, lantern slides, gelatin silver prints, autochromes and so on, all the way up to the 1990s and the explosion of...
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Medium Is Building a Monetized Alternative to Twitter

Medium Is Building a Monetized Alternative to Twitter

The Startup — If you got paid $0.50 to $1.00 (or more) for every Tweet you wrote, would you use Twitter more often? Most content creators would almost certainly answer with an emphatic "Yes!" As part of recent sweeping changes to the platform, Medium has rolled out new options for shortform posts.
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This Musician Shared His Personal Cell Phone Number Online

This Musician Shared His Personal Cell Phone Number Online

Medium — Would you share your personal cell phone number online, and commit to speaking with anyone who decides to call or text you? Most people would probably say "not in a million years" - especially if they're an artist or...
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I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out

I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out

OneZero — Have you ever had a moment of paranoia just before posting a photo of yourself (or your kid) on social media? Maybe you felt a vague sense of unease about making the photo public. Or maybe the nebulous thought occurred to you: "What if someone usedthis for something?"
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Inside the mission control center for California's power grid

Inside the mission control center for California's power grid

SFGate — As Bay Area residents tried hard to stay cool during the September heat wave, a group of people worked frantically, swiftly toggling their eyes between an 80-foot video wall and dozens of screens in a bunker in Folsom. Extreme weather gripped the state, late evening demand spiked, and supply came dangerously close to falling behind.
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Why OpenAI's Codex Won't Replace Coders

Why OpenAI's Codex Won't Replace Coders

IEEE Spectrum — The struggle that most companies have maintaining code causes a second problem: fragility. Every new feature that gets added to the code increases its complexity, which then increases the chance that something will break. It's common for software to grow so complex that the developers avoid changing it more than is absolutely necessary for fear of breaking something.
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