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Data manipulation within the US Federal Government, Freilich, Janet et al. The Lancet. Published July 3, 2025 DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01249-8 – “A US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in the …
“The historical tech tree is a project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois to visualize the entire history of technologies, inventions, and (some) discoveries, from prehistory to today. Unlike other visualizations of the sort, the tree emphasizes the connections between technologies: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations, and so on. These connections allow viewers to understand how technologies came about, at …
Follow up to Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI model and Copyrighted books to train AI? Fair. Storing them? See also The Atlantic – no paywall – Can AI companies keep stealing books to train their models? What Two Judicial Rulings Mean for the Future of Generative AI – “Should tech …
Micah Lee: “Things are heating up. Millions of people are taking to the streets against Trump’s rising authoritarianism. Communities around the US are organizing to defend against ICE raids, to protest Israeli genocide, for mutual aid, and for other forms of fighting fascism. Signal can help people safely organize in all of these contexts. Signal …
404 Media: “…Despite the fact that generative AI has been a destructive force against their businesses, their industry, and the truth more broadly, media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, …
Wired – no paywall: “A new kind of large language model, developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), makes it possible to control how training data is used even after a model has been built. The new model, called FlexOlmo, could challenge the current industry paradigm of big artificial intelligence companies slurping …
“ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM marks a milestone in open-source AI and multilingual excellence. Earlier this week in Geneva, around 50 leading global initiatives and organisations dedicated to open-source LLMs …
Wired no paywall: “First Google and Facebook, then the world. Under Trump 2.0, US statecraft is starting to mimic the worst tendencies of Big Tech….Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to …
Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms. Claire E. Robertson, Kareena S. del Rosario, Jay J. Van Bavel. Elsevier Current Opinion in Psychology Volume 60, December 2024, 101918. “The current paper explains how modern technology interacts with human psychology to create a funhouse mirror version of social norms. We argue …
Federal News Network: “Hundreds of federal agency websites are being targeted for elimination, following a governmentwide review. In an analysis led by the General Services Administration, the 24 largest departments and agencies inventoried more than 7,200 total websites. Documents obtained by Federal News Network show agencies plan to eliminate 332 of those websites — less …
Sally McLaren post on LinkedIn: “Can you trust AI in legal research? Our study tested how leading Generative AI tools responded to fake case citations and the results were eye-opening. While some models correctly flagged the fabricated case, others confidently generated detailed but entirely false legal content, even referencing real statutes and cases. Our table …
The Intercept – How can you deter the Trump administration’s immigrant deportation machine when it pops up in your community? Follow these steps… Out running errands and see a cluster of weirdos kitted out for war, milling about like they’re stuck in a Call of Duty matchmaking lobby? Grab some pics and vids to raise …
