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“There’s a misconception that you can somehow influence or persuade AI systems directly. That’s not really how they work,” says Market Brew founder and Chief Technology Officer Scott Stouffer.

“What you can do is make sure that your information is structured, sourced, and aligned in a way that those systems are more likely to retrieve it when someone asks a question. It’s less about changing the conversation and more about making sure your facts are eligible to be part of it.”

Could using AI for simple tasks make you worse at them?

A new study found that people who relied on AI for basic maths and reading tasks performed better at first, but struggled more once it was removed and were less likely to persist.

#FrAIday: tr.ee/c47YkR
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nitter.net/DigitalEU/status/20

Data centers are straining power grids.

But new research suggests they don’t have to. With the right design, they can generate energy, store it and even reuse waste heat to support nearby communities.
theconversation.com/data-cente

#Italy

Italia, the 10 2025 climate trends photograph a country that does not accelerate

This is what emerges from the Italy for Climate annual report, which, although growing, sees Italia lagging behind the European average

en.ilsole24ore.com/art/italia-

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #UpheavalClimate #ClimateInstability #ClimateDisruption #MassAtrocity #pollution #ecology #environment #climate

Built for a hostile internet: Canonical VP of Engineering on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS https://www.zdnet.com/article/built-for-a-hostile-internet-canonical-vp-of-engineering-on-ubuntu-26-04-lts/#ftag=COS-05-10aaa0j by @sjvn0001

Everything you wanted to know about Ubuntu #Linux 26.04 from the Canonical executive in charge of building it.

@tedunderwood.com that's actually amazing. It shows people capture the original intent, leaving the exact formulation as secondary. Then, of course ~200 characters are not enough for a detailed argument.

Off topic 1: one could say that LLMs successfully replicate this particular behaviour

Off topic 2: provides preliminary evidence why a training set from twitter is inevitably of poor quality

No, baby boys aren’t “less social.” That’s just a stereotype.

Decades of research shows boys and girls are equally wired to connect from day one. But boys are nudged toward toughness over tenderness, given fewer chances to practice empathy and subtly discouraged against connection.

theconversation.com/its-a-myth

That same year [2016] the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence’s official journal StratCom, published a paper entitled ‘It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare’.

The paper proposed methods by which to undermine ISIS: “systematically lure and entrap” recruiters; subvert its messaging via “fake ‘sockpuppet’ accounts” – online personas manufactured to simulate grassroots support or opposition – and “expose and harass people” within its funding network, “including their family members”.

To the editors of the NATO journal, these may have appeared as novel strategic prescriptions. In fact, they had already appeared – in a different context entirely.

Those tactics had been developed and deployed over years by a loose network of far-right organisations – funded, in part, by figures directly connected to Thiel.

And they resemble too much mechanics used by Russian propaganda throughout Europe and beyond.

@TheConversationUS as far as I'm concerned, it matters less whether the message was written by GenAI, than whether the person behind it really meant what is written. And this could not be the case with or without GenAI

@reiver agents seem to be cool. But they raise even harder sustainability questions:

1. They consume even more natural resources, because harnesses mean that the LLMs behind will fidget until they fit the answer to the task.

2. They continue to rely on ever larger models, which is the unsustainable part. Will we finally manage to switch to smaller specialized models? No signs in sight.

Sounds too much like the Kremlin:
"Around the same time, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forced a meeting of Trump’s most trusted advisers. The problem: No one was being honest with the president about the domestic impact of the war.

Privately, Wiles had expressed fears that the inner circle’s rose-tinted retelling of the conflict would leave Trump oblivious to the political reality of the war, just months ahead of a contentious midterm season, reported Time magazine earlier this month."
newrepublic.com/post/209262/do

"Among those monitored were a Palestinian academic invited to give a guest lecture at Manchester Metropolitan University and a pro-Gaza PhD student at the London School of Economics, according to internal documents.

In October 2024, the University of Bristol provided the firm with a list of student protest groups it wished to receive alerts about, an internal university email suggests. It included pro-Palestinian and animal rights activists.

In total, 12 universities paid the firm to monitor campus protest activity. Others include the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University College London (UCL), King’s College London (KCL), the University of Sheffield, the University of Leicester, the University of Nottingham and Cardiff Metropolitan University."
aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/20/u

If what we care about ultimately is equality — as suggested by your first post here — I would propose that our priority ought to be ensuring that no company can “corner the market” on learning. IP creators can forbid copying texts, but the things we learn from them are a collective inheritance.

@tedunderwood.com @axeghostgame.bsky.social fair enough, my "legally unambiguous" is an inappropriate exaggeration. In a system of settlement agreements (Disney, News Corp, Springer and counting in the case of OpenAI), it is easy to get confused about the specific unresolved issues.

So according to this one review article:

1. A tendency might start to emerge to consider commercial AI systems (the technology) fall within fair use

2. But the (business) practice of accessing the original materials is not rarely through acts of piracy. This includes allegations of seeding pirate torrents to enable the anonymous acquisition of pirated content.

copyrightalliance.org/ai-copyr

“Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,” Leo said. “Someone who says that ‘I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
huffpost.com/entry/pope-leo-br

R to @ERC_Research: Learn more about what you need to know before applying for an ERC grant in the 2027 competitions:

• Resubmission restrictions
• Application rules
• Eligibility windows for #ERCStG and #ERCCoG link.europa.eu/BjTmVt
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nitter.net/ERC_Research/status

@axeghostgame.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com those that don't find it are by judges that haven't brothered to ask for the training data. Those that find it, are able to confirm it even without requiring the data. It's the misguided idea of accountability of the "don't ask for permission, but for forgiveness later" mantra.

@tedunderwood.com and yet, we are talking of black box systems that have numerous issues, copyright infringements and illicit content being only two of the clear-cut and legally unambiguous ones.

The technology is one thing, the market is a different one. Legislation (already in the US and continuously more so in the EU) is deliberately closing its eyes of this distinction in the interest of multibillionaires. If not corruption, this is inequality politics at best.

Edit: see discussion below for an admission that "legally unambiguous" is an unnecessary exaggeration.

One of the core problems of GenAI is that it's trained on junk data no one has ever read and reviewed. Once again we see that's a lesson not learned, because in their endless quest to more data for more-of-the-same models, GenAI companies have found a new source of mediocre training slop: work-related chats.
gizmodo.com/failed-companies-a

What are they thinking? Have they never participated in such conversations not to know that in the context of remote-first work, these are the equivalent of watercooler conversations? Noise is the norm there, and transformer models are supposed to filter this out? All this without considering the survivor bias of failed companies (nice pun).

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