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2025-07-14

• 20:34 UTC Bad Actors are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods – Bad Actors are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods Measurements of the effectiveness of the "Pravda" disinformation network: Even with [knowledge of LLM Grooming], ChatGPT nevertheless often repeats propaganda from Pravda. Model o3, OpenAI’s allegedly state of the art “reasoning” model still let Pravda content through 28.6% of the time in response to specific prompts, and 4o cited Pravda content in five out of seven (71.4%) times. In an ideal world, AI would be smart enough to cut off falsehoods at the pass, reasoning from known facts, in order to rule out nonsense. Tags: pravda disinformation russia propaganda llm ai training

2025-07-11

• 09:32 UTC In Memoriam – OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk – In Memoriam - OnlineSafetyAct.co.uk Sites and services which have closed up in the UK due to the risks imposed by the introduction of the Online Safety Act 2023. Meanwhile, the Act has explicit exemptions for "news publishers" and the comments below their articles -- ie. the Daily Mail's racist commentariat Tags: regulation uk internet shutdown censorship daily-mail via:mattround osa

2025-07-03

• 20:26 UTC [toread] Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data! – [toread] Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data! Fun real-world data exploration of US restaurants, from Ethan Zuckerman: Last summer, I wrote about the statistically improbable restaurant, the restaurant you wouldn’t expect to find in a small American city: the excellent Nepali food in Erie, PA and Akron, OH; a gem of a Gambian restaurant in Springfield, IL. Statistically improbable restaurants often tell you something about the communities they are based in: Erie and Akron have large Lhotshampa refugee populations, Nepali-speaking people who lived in Bhutan for years before being expelled from their county; Springfield has University of Illinois Springfield, which attracts lots of west African students, some of whom have settled in the area. Also, wow, I didn't realise how lucky I was in Costa Mesa, CA -- so much good ethnic food all around that area! Tags: geography restaurants food data ethanz usa

2025-07-02

• 10:37 UTC UK Covid inquiry prescribes non-expert “critical thinkers” – UK Covid inquiry prescribes non-expert "critical thinkers" Groupthink underpinned the flawed thinking behind the UK’s pandemic response, a succession of witnesses at the heart of government told the Covid-19 public inquiry. The scientific advice on pandemic risks was overly weighted in favour of biomedical science, Lady Hallett said. What about the social and economic consequences? There was also no “guard against the risks of conventional wisdom becoming embedded in the institutions responsible for emergency preparedness and resilience”. As a result, she called for non-expert "critical thinkers", skilled in "incisive challenge" to be included in "red teams", teams of devil's advocates, to puncture groupthink in future pandemic crisis planning committees. TBH this sounds like a recipe for Dominic Cummings and his Torygraph edgelord pals to ensure that no coherent future pandemic response takes place. But that's the state of the UK for you I guess. Gabriel Scally's take: https://www.bmj.com/content/386/bmj.q1865 Tags: uk uk-politics edgelords dominic-cummings pandemics planning future covid-19 devils-advocates critical-thinking red-teams groupthink experts expertise
• 09:13 UTC Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access – Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access Cloudflare now looking to charge AI crawlers for content access. This is intriguing, and I hope it works -- AI crawlers have been extremely abusive in their crawling practices. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes, as the AI companies have already shown themselves to be happy to disguise their traffic as legit user accesses, with faked user-agent strings and use of proxies.... but let's see Tags: cloudflare ai scraping llms http web pay-per-crawl

2025-07-01

• 11:42 UTC Why China is giving away its tech for free – Why China is giving away its tech for free Interesting Economist article detailing how China's tech scene has discovered the "outcompete via openness" strategy using open source: AI has lately given China’s open-source movement a further boost. Chinese companies, and the government, see open models as the quickest way to narrow the gap with America. DeepSeek’s models have generated the most interest, but Qwen, developed by Alibaba, is also highly rated, and Baidu has said it will soon open up the model behind its Ernie chatbot. China’s enthusiasm for open technology is also extending to hardware. Unitree, a robotics startup based in Hangzhou, has made its training data, algorithms and hardware designs available for free, which may help it to shape global standards. Semiconductors offer another illustration. China is dependent on designs from Western chip firms. As part of its push for self-sufficiency, the government is urging firms to adopt RISC-V, an open chip architecture developed at the University of California, Berkeley. Many Chinese firms also hope that more transparent technology will help them win acceptance for their products abroad. (via Nelson) Tags: via:nelson open-source china free deepseek qwen alibaba unitree transparency

2025-06-30

• 10:44 UTC elidickinson/kidsweather – elidickinson/kidsweather I love this! "Generate kid-friendly weather forecasts suitable for display on a large monitor. Uses OpenWeatherMap and a local or hosted LLM." Nice demo of it in action at https://eli.pizza/posts/eink-weather-display-for-kids/ . I am very tempted to get something like this up and running now... Tags: llms weather forecasts rain dashboards home eink e-paper
• 10:37 UTC That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose – That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose on "sludge" -- Turns out there’s a word for it. In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge” -- tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives. This is one place where EU laws have helped, vs. the US situation -- when you can issue chargebacks, bring crappy vendors to small claims court, and get warranty guarantees up to 2 years after purchase, it clamps down a lot on this painful shite. Tags: sludge business capitalism admin call-centers life guarantees warranty customer-service

2025-06-20

• 09:43 UTC Orange-OpenSource/hurl – Orange-OpenSource/hurl "Hurl; run and test HTTP requests with plain text". This is pretty nice; a really simple plain-text file format to describe making a HTTP request or set of requests, and performing assertions on their results. The only thing I can spot missing is builtin support for OAuth Tags: cli rust tools unix testing linux json curl http tests

2025-06-19

• 09:51 UTC “AI and Semantic Pareidolia” – "AI and Semantic Pareidolia" AI and Semantic Pareidolia: When We See Consciousness Where There Is None: The article introduces the concept of “semantic pareidolia” -- our tendency to attribute consciousness, intelligence, and emotions to AI systems that lack these qualities. It examines how this psychological phenomenon leads us to perceive meaning and intentionality in statistical pattern-matching systems, similar to seeing faces in clouds. It analyses the converging forces intensifying this tendency: increasing digital immersion, profit-driven corporate interests, social isolation, and AI advancement. The article warns of progression from harmless anthropomorphism to problematic AI idolatry, and calls for responsible design practices that help users maintain critical distinctions between simulation and genuine consciousness. It is the English translation and adaptation of an article originally published in Italian in Harvard Business Review Italia, June 2025. (via Rob Pike) Tags: via:rob-pike ai pareidolia paredolia brains illusions llms ethics consciousness

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