Highlights of the week of March 11-17
Фото: Lisa Yount, Unsplash
The European Union will fight the misuse of neural networks, a giant blueberry has been harvested in Autralia, and it's business as usual in the U.S. — crocodiles in the pool and more.
European Parliament against neural nets
On Wednesday, March 13, the European Parliament passed a landmark law that would categorize neural networks according to their purpose and level of danger. The level of risk will be rated from low to unacceptable.
Under the immediate ban, neural networks for non-targeted extraction of images of a person or their face from surveillance cameras, applications for analyzing emotions, social rating, predictive policing, and many others will be banned.
General-purpose neural networks, such as generative systems for text, video, or image generation, will also need to be labeled. This will allow dipfakes to be identified at a glance. How the presence or absence of labels will be monitored has not yet been reported.
An alligator was pulled from an apartment building
The story sounds quite ordinary if we are talking about Florida. There, an alligator in the pool is a normal phenomenon. However, the hero of this news was apprehended by the New York police.
The alligator named Albert lived at the home of Tony Cavallaro, according to the latter, since the 90s. The animal was old, blind in both eyes and had problems with its spine. The services that responded to the call found out that the license to keep a dangerous predator expired in 2021, so the reptile had been living in the house illegally all this time.
Police were called because Tony allowed other people, including children, to splash in the pool with the alligator. The owner says he will fight for the reptile's return, as Albert has long been a member of the family.
Giant blueberry breaks record
The record-breaking fruit was grown on a farm in Australia. The Costa Group invited representatives from the Guinness Book of World Records to record the amazing result. And the record was indeed broken.
The huge berry is almost 40 mm in diameter and weighs 20 grams. It is worth noting that the previous record holder was also from Australia. That berry weighed 16.2 grams.
There are several reasons for this size. Firstly, both berries belong to the Eterna variety, which is characterized by large and juicy fruits. Second, the growing conditions are now adjusted to increase the size of the berries without compromising taste or appearance.
This is because the use of blueberries as a baking or breakfast additive is gradually being phased out and replaced by active use as a nutritious product in its own right.
