Google is building a Duolingo rival into the Translate app: The app can now translate your conversations in real time, too.
New AI-powered live translation and language learning tools in Google Translate
Google Translate is using AI to make live translation and language learning even more helpful.Matt Sheets (Google)
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Texas banned talking on college campuses at night. Seriously.
Update: This article was published on June 5. Since then, Gov. Greg Abbott has signed Senate Bill 2972 into law. It will take effect Sept. 1.
Texas lawmakers trying to muzzle campus protests have just passed one of the most ridiculous anti-speech laws in the country. If signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Senate Bill 2972 would ban speech at night — from study groups to newspaper reporting — at public universities in the state.
Ironically, the bill builds on a previous law passed in 2019 meant to enshrine free speech on Texas campuses. But now, lawmakers want to crack down on college students’ pro-Palestinian protests so badly that they literally passed a prohibition on talking.
We’re not exaggerating. SB 2972 would require public universities in Texas to adopt policies prohibiting “engaging in expressive activities on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.” Expressive activity includes “any speech or expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment or Texas Constitution.
The overnight ban on expressive activities is unfathomably broad. Off the top of our heads, here are just a few examples of what such a policy would prohibit on campus between 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.: Meeting with other students to socialize or study, writing an email, working on a research paper, posting on social media, reporting for the student newspaper, wearing a T-shirt with a slogan, dancing, playing music, painting a picture, or praying at a sunrise service.
Texas has banned talking on college campuses at night. Seriously.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill will ban speech at night — from study groups to newspaper reporting — at the state's public universities.Caitlin Vogus (Houston Chronicle)
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Inside India’s billion-dollar e-waste empire: The informal recycling economy is turning global e-waste into profit — at a steep human and environmental cost.
E-waste recycling drives India’s billion-dollar electronics industry - Rest of World
India’s informal e-waste recycling economy turns millions of discarded electronics into profit while exposing workers to hazardous conditions.Kate Bubacz (Rest of World)
Poland presses ahead with 3 percent digital tax despite Trump threat
Poland presses ahead with 3 percent digital tax despite Trump threat
The tax would not be “aimed at entities from any specific country,” a government ministry said.Pieter Haeck (POLITICO)
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Technology reshared this.
(Social Security Administration)SSA's chief data officer files a whistleblower complaint that DOGE uploaded a database with every Social Security number ever issued to an insecure cloud server
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews;
- Reddit.
:::
Whistleblower Warns of Possible Risks to Americans’ Social Security Information - Government Accountability Project
August 26, 2025 Whistleblower Warns of Possible Risks to Americans’ Social Security Information WASHINGTON—Today, Government Accountability Project submitted a protected whistleblower disclosure to the Office of Special Counsel and congressional…Mary Allain (Government Accountability Project)
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TikTok, Alibaba, Temu Collect Extensive User Data in America
10 popular apps that collect extensive personal data on Americans are foreign-owned [2025] | Incogni
Both foreign and domestic tech companies collect staggering amounts of Americans’ personal data via their mobile applications. Privacy advocates have beenIncogni research (Incogni Blog)
‘Bad, Bad, Bad!’ Democrats Are As Unpopular as the Cracker Barrel Rebrand, CNN’s Data Guru Says
‘Bad, Bad, Bad!’ Democrats Are As Unpopular as the Cracker Barrel Rebrand, CNN’s Data Gu ...
Democrats are as popular as the Cracker Barrel rebrand and in "bad" shape heading into the 2026 midterms, CNN's Harry Enten explainedSean James (Mediaite)
No thumbnail URL when posting
Hey all,
I'm evaluating PieFed as a replacement for Lemmy, with a view to importing my two Lemmy communities to move them out of the failing Lemmy instance they're currently hosted on (a PieFed exclusive I understand). I've created an account and imported my Lemmy settings yesterday, and so far it's been more or less smooth sailing.
But there's one showstopper for me: when I create a post, there's no field to specify the thumbnail image URL. When PieFed guesses the image URL correctly, no problem. But here, I just posted this YouTube video, and just like on Lemmy half of the time, the thumbnail image didn't get picked up. On Lemmy, I always manually insert the thumbnail URL when I post YouTube links for that reason.
Similarly, some sites make it extra-hard for software to correctly guess the og:image - Reuters for instance - and so in those cases when it doesn't work, I manually set the correct thumbnail URL too.
Here on PieFed, there doesn't seem to be a provision to set the thumbnail URL.
Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something obvious? I really doubt this basic functionality is missing from PieFed.
FYI PieFed doesn't use thumbnails for youtube videos, it just embeds the video directly:
Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my original post.
Indeed the video shows up fine in Piefed. What I meant was the view from Lemmy is devoid of thumbnail. For instance, my Youtube post seen from Sopuli:
When I said it was a dealbreaker for me, it's because I (usually) always try to make posts with a thumbnail to make them more attractive on Lemmy. Even if it's just a question, I'll upload a picture to illustrate what I want to say, and then write whatever I want to write in the body.
I find it nicer to offer a visual clue in all my posts. But when you look at my Piefed Youtube video from Lemmy, the thumbnail it's just a bleak arrow on a bleak background. Not super appealing.
So I guess what I meant was that I want to manually supply a thumbnail URL for the benefit of Lemmy viewers.
Yep, I understood but if Lemmy can't do thumbnails for youtube videos that's a Lemmy problem.
That said, we've had an open issue for this feature for a couple of months and the person who created it is a frequent contributor to PieFed so there's a very good chance it'll get coded quite soon.
Yeah clearly a Lemmy problem, even when posting directly from Lemmy.The whole manual thumbnail URL thing is clearly a workaround for when the automatic thumbnailer is deficient.
But as a mere user, my aim is to make posts that are correct and somewhat appealing. So I work with what I have 🙂
I have accepted myself I am Bisexual.
I have no one to tell IRL without getting shame so yeah.
:::
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'Most Illegal Search I've Ever Seen': Trump's DC Crackdown Results in Stream of Abuses
'Most Illegal Search I've Ever Seen': Trump's DC Crackdown Results in Stream of Abuses
"A high school student would know this was an illegal search," emphasized US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.brad-reed (Common Dreams)
Framework Laptop 16. Upgraded!
Framework Laptop 16 pre-orders are now open!
Framework Laptop 16 is an endlessly customizable laptop with upgradable graphics, powered by NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070 and AMD's latest Ryzen™ AI 300 Series processors.Framework
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The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations
President Donald Trump has has long considered both the media and higher education as his enemies — which makes college media a ripe target. The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed that she co-wrote for the Tufts University campus paper proved that student journalists are at risk, especially foreign writers who dared criticize Israel’s war on Gaza.
But one student newspaper is fighting back.
The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.
“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.
“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
Soon after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.
“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.
Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.
Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.
In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”
“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.
The next week, the Stanford Daily editorsran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.
“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”
Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.
The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”
There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.
[
Related
The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim](theintercept.com/2025/04/10/de…)
In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.
In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.
The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.
“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.”
[
Read our complete coverage
Chilling Dissent](theintercept.com/collections/c…)
In recent months, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.
In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”
Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.
Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.
“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”
Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”
[
Related
The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free](theintercept.com/2025/03/13/ma…)
“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.
“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.
Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.
“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”
The post The Student Newspaper Suing Marco Rubio Over Targeted Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.
The Legal Argument That Could Set Mahmoud Khalil Free
Lawyers trying to free Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil point to a legal exception undermining the Trump administration’s argument.Jonah Valdez (The Intercept)
Trump shooting and Biden exit flipped social media from hostility to solidarity: how political crises cause a shift in the force behind viral online content ‘from outgroup hate to ingroup love’.
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36350410
The University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab collected over 62,000 public posts from the Facebook accounts of hundreds of US politicians, commentators and media outlets before and after these events to see how they affected online behaviour.*“We wanted to understand the kinds of content that went viral among Republicans and Democrats during this period of high tension for both groups,” said Malia Marks, PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and lead author of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Negative emotions such as anger and outrage along with hostility towards opposing political groups are usually rocket fuel for social media engagement. You might expect this to go into hyperdrive during times of crisis and external threat.”
“However, we found the opposite. It appears that political crises evoke not so much outgroup hate but rather ingroup love,” said Marks.
Just after the Trump assassination attempt, Republican-aligned posts signalling unity and shared identity received 53% more engagement than those that did not – an increase of 17 percentage points compared to just before the shooting.
These included posts such as evangelist Franklin Graham thanking God that Donald Trump is alive, and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham posting: “Bleeding and unbowed, Trump faces relentless attacks yet stands strong for America. This is why his followers remain passionately loyal.”
At the same time, engagement levels for Republican posts attacking the Democrats saw a decrease of 23 percentage points from just a few days earlier.
After Biden suspended his re-election campaign, Democrat-aligned posts expressing solidarity received 91% more engagement than those that did not – a major increase of 71 percentage points over the period shortly before his withdrawal.
Posts included former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calling Biden “one of our most pro-worker presidents”, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posting that Biden’s “legacy of vision, values and leadership make him one of the most consequential Presidents in American history.”
Biden’s withdrawal saw the continuation of a gradual rise in engagement for Democrat posts attacking Republicans – although over the 25 July days covered by the analysis almost a quarter of all conservative posts displayed “outgroup hostility” compared to just 5% of liberal posts.
Trump shooting and Biden exit flipped social media from hostility to solidarity: how political crises cause a shift in the force behind viral online content ‘from outgroup hate to ingroup love’.
The University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab collected over 62,000 public posts from the Facebook accounts of hundreds of US politicians, commentators and media outlets before and after these events to see how they affected online behaviour.*“We wanted to understand the kinds of content that went viral among Republicans and Democrats during this period of high tension for both groups,” said Malia Marks, PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and lead author of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Negative emotions such as anger and outrage along with hostility towards opposing political groups are usually rocket fuel for social media engagement. You might expect this to go into hyperdrive during times of crisis and external threat.”
“However, we found the opposite. It appears that political crises evoke not so much outgroup hate but rather ingroup love,” said Marks.
Just after the Trump assassination attempt, Republican-aligned posts signalling unity and shared identity received 53% more engagement than those that did not – an increase of 17 percentage points compared to just before the shooting.
These included posts such as evangelist Franklin Graham thanking God that Donald Trump is alive, and Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham posting: “Bleeding and unbowed, Trump faces relentless attacks yet stands strong for America. This is why his followers remain passionately loyal.”
At the same time, engagement levels for Republican posts attacking the Democrats saw a decrease of 23 percentage points from just a few days earlier.
After Biden suspended his re-election campaign, Democrat-aligned posts expressing solidarity received 91% more engagement than those that did not – a major increase of 71 percentage points over the period shortly before his withdrawal.
Posts included former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calling Biden “one of our most pro-worker presidents”, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi posting that Biden’s “legacy of vision, values and leadership make him one of the most consequential Presidents in American history.”
Biden’s withdrawal saw the continuation of a gradual rise in engagement for Democrat posts attacking Republicans – although over the 25 July days covered by the analysis almost a quarter of all conservative posts displayed “outgroup hostility” compared to just 5% of liberal posts.
Trump shooting and Biden exit flipped social media from hostility to solidarity
Research reveals how political crises cause a shift in the force behind viral online content ‘from outgroup hate to ingroup love’.University of Cambridge
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Our civilization grew faster than our primate brains. Well, most of us.
Option 1 - Figure out how to transfer our consciousness to another (more positive) reality.
neurosciencenews.com/sleep-con…
Option 2 - Lets start that orgy!
psychologyfor.com/what-is-an-o…
Neuroscience News
Neuroscience News provides research news for neuroscience, neurology, psychology, AI, brain science, mental health, robotics and cognitive sciences.Neuroscience News
acsh.org/news/2024/09/17/can-m…
Do I agree? Survey says... 💯
Can Murder Be Moral?
Murder is the unlawful, premeditated killing of one human being by another. It's also considered immoral. Sometimes, however, killing another human can be legal and moral, say during acts of self-defense.American Council on Science and Health
The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon
There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think, and you're still not going to get an A on your report.
You see, now that people have been using AI for everything and anything, they're beginning to realize that its results, while fast and sometimes useful, tend to be mediocre.
My take is LLMs can speed up some work, like paraphrasing, but all the time that gets saved is diverted to verifying the output.
The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon
Opinion: Are tech giants getting nervous? They should beSteven J. Vaughan-Nichols (The Register)
Federal prosecutors failed three times to persuade a grand jury to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an immigration operation in Washington, D.C.
Three different federal grand juries declined to indict Sydney Reid for assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, prosecutors disclosed in a court filing late on Monday. Prosecutors then downgraded the offense to a misdemeanor.
U.S. prosecutors in Washington sought to bring a felony assault charge against Reid, accusing her of pushing the FBI agent’s hand against a cement wall. The July 22 confrontation happened as Reid was filming officers who were transferring two men accused of gang activity into federal immigration custody outside a Washington jail, according to court documents.
The alleged assault occurred while Reid was being pinned against the wall by federal agents. Officers sought to subdue her after she attempted to get between law enforcement and one of the suspects, according to a charging document.
How the world's biggest bank is bracing for climate catastrophe
JP Morgan chase recently published a comprehensive climate report which spelled out to its investors how they should be adapting to the coming storm and pointed out all the lucrative investment opportunities a warming planet presents (like melting sea ice & thawing permafrost opening up new trade routes and mining sites, and increasing temperatures providing an uplift to the air-conditioning market. Meanwhile the UK Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, who are financial risk managers, published their own analysis with a very different outlook. This video compares and contrasts the two reports.
JP Morgan document / dark comedy: jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm/c…
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
I mean, yes, and yes.
I can even see the logic in it, from an individual perspective. How do you, as an individual, prepare for global climate collapse? By making as much money as possible, so when resources get scarcer and more expensive you can still afford them - and by gathering resources under your control to prepare for a time when those resources become unavailable on the market - whether your money making activity speeds up the climate collapse or not. So how do you, as a business, prepare for global climate collapse? Exactly the same.
It's the tragedy of the commons as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
"No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it."
~ Some wise person who has never been in my kitchen.
Making money only makes individualist sense if you assume that there will still be a state apparatus enforcing and maintaining that ownership. All it takes is a communist revolution and your assets are no longer yours. And guess what becomes more likely as climate catastrophe looms?
The businesses themselves do not benefit from climate catastrophe either. But businesses don't decide what they do, the owners of those businesses do. And those owners are ipso facto tied to the current model of ownership.
The business doing well - expanding its holdings, making profit, insuring itself against risks, etc. - is completely secondary to the business behaving in ways that satisfy the business owners.
Tragedies of the commons are patched all the time in business. Enforcing corporate contracts would be a tragedy of the commons, yet businesses all submit themselves to corporate law. Collusion would be a tragedy of the commons, so that is made illegal and corporations are forced to treat all business partners equally. The bank bailouts of 2008 cost most businesses a lot of money through taxation and deferred social services for their employees. And when there was an algorithm glitch and the stock market acted crazy for one day in the 2010s, everybody agreed to just revert before that day.
Because at the end of the day, if climate catastrophe was a tragedy of the commons for them, they would be okay with a liberal environmentalist president. Someone who preserves rich people's privilege even as the economics are reorganized.
But they are not. They treat climate change prevention as the existential threat. They pool trillions of dollars to elect an unreliable egomaniac fascist just so they don't end up with a Democrat.
They don't care about their own wellbeing or even their privilege, they care about playing the game. They want to be rich because they optimized ruthlessly for personal profit.
There was a meme going around at some point to the tune of
I don't get why both teams don't work together in basketball - imagine how many points they could score!
It is not about the points, it's about the game that arises when you only care about points within a specific ruleset. And for capitalists, the ruleset of the game they want to play is not compatible with climate change prevention.
Tldr; the nature of capitalism is juxtaposed to any action to ease the ongoing climate emergency.
See how I cleverly used the word nature in there?
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st August 2025 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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argmin.net/p/the-banal-evil-of…
Once again shilling another great Ben Recht post. This time calling out the fucking insane irresponsibility of "responsible" AI providers to do the bare minimum to prevent people from having psychological beaks from reality.
"I’ve been stuck on this tragic story in the New York Times about Adam Raine, a 16-year-old who took his life after months of getting advice on suicide from ChatGPT. Our relationship with technological tools is complex. That people draw emotional connections to chatbots isn’t new (I see you, Joseph Weizenbaum). Why young people commit suicide is multifactorial. We’ll see whether a court will find OpenAI liable for wrongful death.
But I’m not a court of law. And OpenAI is not only responsible, but everyone who works there should be ashamed of themselves."
The Banal Evil of AI Safety
Chatbot companies are harmful and dishonest. How can we hold them accountable?Ben Recht (arg min)
It's a good post. A few minor quibbles:
The “nonprofit” company OpenAI was launched under the cynical message of building a “safe” artificial intelligence that would “benefit” humanity.
I think at least some of the people at launch were true believers, but strong financial incentives and some cynics present at the start meant the true believers didn't really have a chance, culminating in the board trying but failing to fire Sam Altman and him successfully leveraging the threat of taking everyone with him to Microsoft. It figures one of the rare times rationalists recognize and try to mitigate the harmful incentives of capitalism they fall vastly short. OTOH... if failing to convert to a for-profit company is a decisive moment in popping the GenAI bubble, then at least it was good for something?
These tools definitely have positive uses. I personally use them frequently for web searches, coding, and oblique strategies. I find them helpful.
I wish people didn't feel the need to add all these disclaimers, or at least put a disclaimer on their disclaimer. It is a slightly better autocomplete for coding that also introduces massive security and maintainability problems if people entirely rely on it. It is a better web search only relative to the ad-money-motivated compromises Google has made. It also breaks the implicit social contract of web searches (web sites allow themselves to be crawled so that human traffic will ultimately come to them) which could have pretty far reaching impacts.
One of the things I liked and didn't know about before
Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.
That is hilarious! Kind of overkill to be honest, I think they've really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks. But I like the author's overall point that this shut-it-down approach could be used for a variety of topics.
One of the comments gets it:
Safety team/product team have conflicting goals
LLMs aren't actually smart enough to make delicate judgements, even with all the fine-tuning and RLHF they've thrown at them, so you're left with over-censoring everything or having the safeties overridden with just a bit of prompt-hacking (and sometimes both problems with one model)/1
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Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.
it might be that, or it may have been intended to shut off any output of medical-sounding advice. if it's the former, then it's rare rationalist W for wrong reasons
I think they’ve really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks.
look up the story of vil mirzayanov. break out these bayfucker style salaries in eastern europe or india or number of other places and you'll find a long queue of phds willing to cook man made horrors beyond your comprehension. it might even not take six figures (in dollars or euros) after tax
LLMs aren’t actually smart enough to make delicate judgements
maybe they really made machines in their own image
Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech
Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech
President’s move could hit UK’s digital services tax and measures in EU states such as France, Italy and SpainMark Sweney (The Guardian)
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Technology reshared this.
Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech
Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech
President’s move could hit UK’s digital services tax and measures in EU states such as France, Italy and SpainMark Sweney (The Guardian)
Technology reshared this.
Google Gemini’s AI image model gets a ‘bananas’ upgrade
Google Gemini's AI image model gets a 'bananas' upgrade | TechCrunch
Google says that it's behind the anonymous AI image editor "nano-banana" that's been making waves on social media.Maxwell Zeff (TechCrunch)
Technology reshared this.
This looks very impressive.
I try to stay away from ai image models for ethics reasons, and I’ve already seen this used to generate fake before and after photos for workouts and diet pills…
The scammers are going to love this one…
“Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,” Pritzker said. “You are neither wanted here nor needed here.”
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed back Monday on President Donald Trump’s threat to deploy the National Guard to the state.
“What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted,” Pritzker said at a news conference. “It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
Pritzker claimed Trump is manufacturing a crisis and noted that neither he nor Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson had been contacted by the White House about working together.
Pritzker pointed out that murders, shootings, robberies and burglaries are all down year over year.
Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections
The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.
The current map, adopted in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — Utah’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.
District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering.
Spontankonzert mit einem Meister auf der Gitarre und einer Loopmaschine
Die Wetteraussichten sind schön, die Musikaussichten gut.
@Donau Vista Würstel Club (inoffiziell)
kino.schuerz.at/w/dgsy3nk251ee…
Ein Haus am See am DVWC
Hach das Leben kann so schön sein...
Radfahren, Sonnenschein, kühle Luft, kühles Bier, ein Greifenburger, baden in der Alten Donau und "Ein Haus am See" aus den Boxen🤩🥰
A judge orders Kari Lake to answer questions about Voice of America under oath
At a court hearing, U.S District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth said Lake was "verging on contempt of court" for failing to comply with his repeated orders to make information available about her intentions for the future of the federally funded international broadcaster.
He said Lake and two aides had to testify by Sept. 15 and provide the court with detailed information she had, to date, withheld about Voice of America and its federal parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media. One of the aides is Frank Wuco, a political appointee who helped to investigate Voice of America journalists for perceived anti-Trump bias at the end of President Trump's first term. (A different federal judge later found that to be unconstitutional.)
Republican Commerce Department issues stop-work order for offshore wind project that is 80% complete
The order follows a Thursday announcement from the US Commerce Department that it had initiated an investigation on August 13 into “the effects on the national security of imports of wind turbines and their parts and components,” which could allow Trump to apply increased tariffs to wind turbines.
In a company announcement on Friday, Orsted said that Revolution Wind is already 80 percent complete. It is located in federal waters about 15 miles south of Port Judith, Rhode Island, halfway between Block Island, Rhode Island, and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Trump admin issues stop-work order for offshore wind project
Project was 80 percent complete and was slated to power more than 350,000 homes.Inside Climate News (Ars Technica)
US House committee requests Epstein 'birthday book' from his estate
A US panel investigating the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein has requested that the executors of his estate produce a number of documents, including a book said to have contained personal messages for his 50th birthday.
The subpoena from James Comer, the leader of the House Oversight Committee, represents an expansion of his investigation into Epstein, the disgraced late paedophile financier.
US House committee requests Epstein 'birthday book' from his estate
A panel investigating the disgraced late financier's crimes has subpoenaed an alleged file with notes from associates.James FitzGerald (BBC News)
Modi refused Trump's calls 4 times in recent weeks: German newspaper
Modi refused Trump's calls 4 times in recent weeks: German newspaper
US President Donald Trump tried to talk to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi four times in recent weeks amid a raging trade dispute but the Indian leader refused to talk according to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine This demonstrates the ang…India Today News Desk (India Today)
The case against Kilmar Ábrego García is a study in sadistic absurdity
The case against Kilmar Ábrego García is a study in sadistic absurdity
In its allegations against the Maryland man, the Trump administration is claiming authority over reality itselfMoira Donegan (The Guardian)
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Google will verify Android developers distributing apps outside the Play store
Google is increasing security measures around sideloading apps by removing anonymity for Android developers who distribute outside of the Play Store. Starting in September next year, Google will require developers in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand to verify their identities in order for their apps to be installed on certified Android devices via direct downloads or third-party app stores. This requirement will then roll out globally in “2027 and beyond.”Under the new requirements, Android developers will need to provide Google with personal details like their legal name, address, email, and phone number, and may need to upload an official government ID. Identity verification is already a requirement for Google Play, so this change mostly impacts developers who solely distribute their apps outside of the Play Store.
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Inside India’s billion-dollar e-waste empire | India’s booming electronics sector has contributed to a quickly growing e-waste recycling industry worth $1.5 billion
E-waste recycling drives India’s billion-dollar electronics industry - Rest of World
India’s informal e-waste recycling economy turns millions of discarded electronics into profit while exposing workers to hazardous conditions.Kate Bubacz (Rest of World)
Where can I find "fallback emailer" and set it?
Hello everybody!
The question is written in the subject.
See screenshot attached
Can't find it anywhere and have no clues, what the issue is.
NodeBB 4.4.6 latest on-premise. and self hosted SMTP setup.
SMTP is working with no problems.
Re: Where can I find "fallback emailer" and set it?
Twissell I think the "fallback emailer" is literally just searching for a "mail" executable on the machine.
It's pretty outdated now, since emailing directly from your machine is a good way to just get your emails to land in a spam bin somewhere. We should probably just update this to ℹ️ or ⚠️ instead of an error.
KindnessisPunk
in reply to pelespirit • • •Raoul Duke
in reply to KindnessisPunk • • •