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Digital Digging: “Google is rebuilding Search to answer instead of point. It still shows you the sources — it just decided, before you did, how few you’d need. Here’s the fix, and why the old operators matter more now than they ever did. On May 19 Google announced the biggest change to its search box …
Via Reddit – “This is what the storage of user information by an age verification company called FaceTec looks like, one of the big players alongside Persona and Yoti. They claim to be “privacy-friendly,” but they proudly allow companies that purchase their software/solution to store as much user data as they want. The company permits …
NiemanLabs: “On Wednesday, The Economist launched its own ChatGPT app — the first of its kind by a major consumer news publication. “The Economist – Graphs” runs natively inside ChatGPT and allows users to interact with the publication’s data visualizations. At launch, the app is focused solely on U.S. polling data. After installing the app, …
NPR: “A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area. [See the YouTube video here] The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a vanished …
Wired: “So far this year, authorities have seized or demanded ballots from elections in four states. Experts fear the trend could throw the midterms into chaos unless courts draw a line. As US voters look to the November midterms, the Trump administration is obsessed with looking back to past elections, seizing ballots cast years ago …
Biased AI writing assistants shift users’ attitudes on societal issues. Sci Adv. 2026 Mar 11;12(11):eadw5578. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adw5578 – Artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to make autocomplete suggestions to people as they write text. Can these AI writing assistants affect people’s attitudes in this process? In two large-scale …
slop·py·pas·ta n. “Verbatim LLM output copy-pasted at someone, unread, unrefined, and unrequested. From slop (low-quality AI-generated content) + copypasta (text copied and pasted, often as a meme, without critical thought). It is considered rude because it asks the recipient to do work the sender did not bother to do themselves. You just got an unread …
404 Media [no paywall]: “No one wants to live next to a noisy computer warehouse and communities across the country are successfully fighting them. Opposition to the massive data centers that power AI is bipartisan and growing across the country. From Maine to California, more states and local communities are passing moratoriums and bans on …
The New York Times Gift Article: “….Brainstorming is the work that’s fundamental to writing. As a researcher studying A.I.’s effects on education, I have concluded that these tools only superficially improve writing. The bigger and more alarming impact they have is to constrict our full range of thoughts and our ability to generate original and …
The Verge [no paywall] – “How newsrooms should use AI — or if they should at all — has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times …
Confidential Government Information Nondisclosure Agreement, Federal Register, May 27, 2026 AGENCY: Office of Personnel Management. ACTION: Notice with request for comment. SUMMARY: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requests comment on a draft nondisclosure agreement (NDA) for use by Federal agencies for both new and existing employees. The form is intended to document Federal employees’ …
404 Media – Now They Want to Give Cops Access: “BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S., now plans to turn those cameras into automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, and give that data to …