Digg is back again and has taken on yet another form: A website that aggregates news about artificial intelligence. Digg's job is to find that signal and bring it to you. AI is just the beginning, he said, calling it the noisiest, fastest-moving space on the internet. He promised that more verticals are coming, but he didn't say when Digg will start aggregating news about other topics. At the moment, the website follows 1,000 people directly involved in AI research, investing and media, built from X's social graph.

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An off-the-grid New Hampshire man's days living as a hermit appear to be over. "River Dave," whose cabin in the woods burned down after nearly three decades on property that he was ordered to leave, says he doesn't think he can return to his lifestyle.

"The idea began when I discovered the A.I. had no problem fixing the marks and scratches on the only authenticated portrait of Billy the Kid I fed it. I then experimented with other historical figures of whom no or little photographic material existed: Napoleon, Julius Ceasar, Queen Elizabeth etc." Uterwijk uploaded up to 20 different paintings into the generative adversarial network and says he was able to reconstruct images that were visual averages of the different sources "with the help of this software that is trained on thousands of human faces, towards an almost photo-realistic version." "Getting a good likeness together with a certain level of realism and a strong appearance of the character can take hours or even days of tweaking," Uterwijk explained.

The Lumière Brothers' 1895 short "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" is one of the most famous film clips in history -- you've almost certainly seen the 50-second movie at some point in your life. But just to refresh your memory, here's the clip again (Update: we've added the original clip used by the upscaler): YouTuber Denis Shiryaev wanted to update the look of the clip, so -- with the help of several neural networks -- he upscaled the clip to 4K resolution and 60 FPS.

Now that Sports Illustrated's three owners, Meredith Corp., Authentic Brands Group, and TheMaven, have completed the callous layoff of half of Sports Illustrated's newsroom and finalized a deal that gives control of the publication to TheMaven, a wannabe tech company helmed by notorious scumbags Ross Levinsohn and James Heckman, the future of Sports Illustrated is coming into focus.

During my time at betaworks last summer, I worked on extracting principal topics from messages that Digg's Facebook Messenger Bot received. This post explains a topic extraction method I created specifically for chat messages, which we later used to develop RIO -- a topic mining engine that uses reinforcement to tune its algorithm and automatically predict tags for chat messages and news articles. Conversational bots today understand user messages only when rules are hard-coded to match the exact message pattern. Such scripted bots find it hard to scale and can be frustrating for users who want to have a basic natural language exchange with the bot. Every bot provides a service (for Digg this is news), but users don't necessarily restrict their messages to that.

The unveiling of the Facebook chatbot platform has created a veritable maelstrom of activity in Silicon Valley. Every day, a new article either bemoaning the digitization of communication or celebrating the simplicity of automation, weighs in on this phenomenon. Is 2016 the year of the chatbot? Will chatbots prove to be the Google of A.I.? Will they replace our current models of customer service? Despite WIRED declaring that "Facebook believes messenger will anchor a post-app internet," the much more modest (and realistic) assessment of bots is that they will exist harmoniously alongside apps.

Here's the thing about the Internet: there's a lot of it and not everything is gold. The job of a news aggregator is to sort through each day's daily dose of Internet and choose the most interesting and relevant stories and videos for you people. Different sites have taken different approaches to this problem; Google News uses its algorithms to deliver a personalized homepage, Reddit uses upvotes and downvotes to deliver the freshest stream of dog photos and entertaining AskReddit topics. Here at Digg, we use humans because our goal is not to recommend lots of good things, but to surface a small amount of the very best things. And while algorithms are good at lots of things, we think that humans have the advantage at recognizing this type of content. However, algorithms are useful when we need to make lots of decisions about what to show you, and this problem arises on our video pages.

Internet memes are phenomena that rapidly gain popularity or notoriety on the Internet. Often, modifications or spoofs add to the profile of the original idea thus turning it into a phenomenon that transgresses social and cultural boundaries. It is commonly assumed that Internet memes spread virally but scientific evidence as to this assumption is scarce. In this paper, we address this issue and investigate the epidemic dynamics of 150 famous Internet memes. Our analysis is based on time series data that were collected from Google Insights, Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon. We find that differential equation models from mathematical epidemiology as well as simple log-normal distributions give a good account of the growth and decline of memes. We discuss the role of log-normal distributions in modeling Internet phenomena and touch on practical implications of our findings.