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Via Kottke – this episode of This American Life from a few weeks ago, Masha Gessen read an excerpt from their book Surviving Autocracy about the particular kind of lie used by autocrats like Putin and Trump. Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by …
NPR: “…That is the Internet Archive,” said Mark Graham, the director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, pointing to the server stacks. Graham was leading about a dozen visitors on a weekly public tour of the headquarters on a recent Friday in March. He projected his voice to be heard over the drone of the …
ZDNET: “Need to keep track of collections of things for your home or business? Here’s all you need to get started, add new items, and search for them [using] LibreOffice, the open-source office suite. This free tool includes a powerful database feature that allows you to create databases and GUIs for interacting with your databases. …
The Observer: “Last week, several workers in the art and preservation unit of the General Services Administration (GSA) were placed on leave before being informed that their offices and positions would soon be eliminated. According to reporting by the Washington Post, the action affected more than half of the division’s approximately three dozen staff members …
Society of Authors: “Meta has used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programmes. Yesterday (20 March 2025), The Atlantic published a searchable database of over 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. This data set, called Library Genesis or ‘LibGen’ for short, is full of pirated material, and all of it has …
TechCrunch: “Google has reported the results of an experiment it ran which removed news from search results for 1% of users for 2.5 months in eight* markets in Europe — claiming the results show that news is essentially worthless to Google’s ad business. The search giant conducted the test because European copyright law requires it …
The Atlantic – no paywall: “…Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen …
Three Things to Know by Fred Rocha: “These are exciting times to be on Mastodon, one of the flavours of the Fediverse. Things are evolving fast, towards a space worthy of healthier online debate and exchange. Some of these conversations can be found on my own profile, if you’re curious. Here are some of the …
404 Media unlocked: “Any of these Reels could have been and probably was made in a matter of seconds or minutes. Many of the accounts that post them post multiple times per day. There are thousands of these types of accounts posting thousands of these types of Reels and images across every social media platform. …
Via LLRX – AI in Finance and Banking, March 18, 2025 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links …
“At Free Law Project, we believe in transparency and sharing our innovations. Today we’re excited to announce our latest development in semantic search: our embedding generation tool and the underlying machine learning model that we will be using in our new semantic search engine. While semantic search might sound complex, we’ve focused on making it …
The New York Times unlocked: “The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” …
