Week 16

Fast Company: "Study finds asking AI for advice could be making you a worse person.. Just one interaction with an AI could lower your willingness to apologize or take accountability for harm done..

The two-part study, titled 'Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence,' was recently published in the journal Science. The experiment made the case that using chatbots for personal advice and navigating emotional situations can be harmful because the system is designed to tell people what they want to hear. Using chatbots may reinforce troubling behavior rather than help people take accountability for harm and apologize.

A recent Cognitive FX poll found that about 38% of Americans report using AI chatbots weekly for emotional support"

The Lever: "Offshore Accounts For Me, TurboTax For Thee.. While shutting down free direct filing for everyday taxpayers, the IRS is letting the ultrawealthy hide billions of dollars in foreign accounts."

"@katz_morris

[Randy Villegas is] the only candidate in CA-22 who’s not beholden to corporations."

Trying out "nomato sauce". Some diets avoid "nightshades"; peppers, tomatos, eggplants, advise replacing tomato based sauces with ones without, ergo the name nomato. There is one using beets, carrots, spices, easy to make.

Woha.. That was some freak hallucination by LLM, it literally made up a formula on the PDF I gave it. Said "this line blah blah is wrong", I look the formula, it does not say that.

"@voltooidverledentijd@voltooidverledentijd.noblogs.org

Folks in Gaza, here’s some good news for you.

A European Citizens’ Initiative that demands the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement in view of Israel’s violations of human rights is getting close to the required one million signatures."

"@mike_k@mstdn.social

Australia increased its defence spending by reclassifying military pensions as defence spending. Hey presto, numbers go up.

Just like that time Australia cut its greenhouse gas emissions by using an imaginary increase in logging as a baseline then measured actual logging against that. Hey presto, numbers go down."

Nearly as funny as the original Bruce Almighty scene

#ArnoldAlmighty

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ITPro: "Digital rights organizers warn UK is too reliant on big tech, urge digital sovereignty.. The Open Rights Group calls for open source tech to drive digital sovereignty in the UK public sector and protect national security"

Politico: "Bipartisan Senate legislation with White House backing would require mega-landlords like Wall Street firms to sell their properties after several years — one of multiple ways that lawmakers are attempting to put more housing units on the market for American families."

Reuters: "Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Tuesday her government had suspended a ‌defence cooperation deal with Israel, reflecting frayed ties between previously close allies as the conflicts in the Middle East continue."

CSIS: "Every drone involved in the war in Ukraine depends on China. From palm-sized quadcopters guiding artillery to long-range loitering munitions, nearly every unmanned system on both sides contains materials and components that originate in Chinese factories and refineries."

"@jalefkowit@vmst.io

If you are wondering what the 'Tech Prosperity Corps' might be, it is apparently a new Peace Corps program to send people into developing countries and tell them to use AI"

Harvard Business Review: "Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got 'Trendslop' in Return... Leaders might assume that LLMs are able to offer a kind of unbiased, outside perspective. Trained on huge corpuses, it’s fair to assume that they might offer a fresh perspective. Unfortunately, that might be a mistake. An LLM is not the colleague who critically evaluates current ideas, looks into the contextual specifics, stress-tests assumptions, and pushes back when everyone gets comfortable. On strategy, LLMs might be more akin to a freshly minted MBA or junior consultant, parroting what’s popular rather than what’s right for a particular situation."

Bylines Scotland: "Israel’s support base in the US shrinks.. New polling shows that 60% of Americans have an unfavourable view of Israel, which is likely to mean the end of bipartisan support"

"@jschauma@mstdn.social

slow clap to everybody out there doing Anthropic's Marketing Team's job for them. 🍿"

Bloomberg: "The blockade may not work as intended, as China can afford to go without Iranian supplies for several weeks by relying on its strategic petroleum reserve, and Iran can remain defiant longer than the US can remain solvent."

"@kim@social.gfsc.studio

gonna tell my grandkids this was microsoft copilot"

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"@nerdpr0f@infosec.exchange

sigh Mythos messaging is starting to hit regular people. I've already had to explain twice, now, how Mythos isn't going to decrypt all network traffic.

This is exhausting."

"@isotopp@infosec.exchange

@gvwilson This is normal repo buyout for impersonation and supply chain attacks.

The project ownership changes hands and the module, part of other projects, is then used to eventually inject malicious code.

Particularly interesting in Android, if the application signing key also changes hands."

"@gvwilson@mastodon.social

Got this out of the blue: 'I came across your work on GitHub and wanted to reach out. I acquire private production codebases and the operational artifacts around them—Jira tickets, PRDs, Notion pages, support threads, Figma files, etc. If you have any private repos or internal projects you've moved on from , I'd be interested in buying them. Same goes for any project management history.' Presume it's someone trying to build a back story for an impersonation attack—anyone else seeing this?"

"@slop@fuckaas.space

i am announcing a third blockade on the strait"

"The dog-centric fashion magazine Dogue is facing a lawsuit from the publisher of Vogue.. Condé Nast is alleging that the magazine uses Vogue images without permission and that the publication is confusing to customers"

Canary: "Illegal UK weapons shipment intercepted in Belgian airport bound for Israel.. Illegal UK weapons shipment intercepted in Belgian airport bound for Israel"

The key is using your body weight for every attack / defense. Study on this.

See the guy is fat and out of shape, but he can still do that move.

How do I escape a choke, bro? do this

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"Breakthrough: Hydrogen Finally Cheaper Than Gas?"

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Empty shelves? How about empty shelves of armaments bih?

Live by neoliberalism die by neoliberalism

#Murphy

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Futurism: "For years now, AI companies, including Google, Meta, Anthropic, and OpenAI, have insisted that their large language models aren’t technically storing copyrighted works in their memory and instead 'learn' from their training data like a human mind.. [but a] new study could put AI companies on the defensive. In it, Stanford and Yale researchers found compelling evidence that AI models are actually copying all that data, not 'learning' from it. Specifically, four prominent LLMs — OpenAI’s GPT-4.1, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, xAI’s Grok 3, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet — happily reproduced lengthy excerpts from popular — and protected — works, with a stunning degree of accuracy."

"@PabloMartini@climatejustice.social

Good job!

France launches government linux desktop plan as windows exit begins, a big loss to USA & Micro$lop, more exit to FOSS follows Denmark and states in Germany.

Great Stuff!"

"France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins.. France is transitioning government desktops to Linux, with each ministry required to formalize its implementation plan by autumn 2026."

#ClaudeMythos #MoBitar

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ProPublica: "More than 400,000 Arizonans have lost their SNAP benefits since July.. interviews suggest that Arizona’s efforts to comply [to new federal law], combined with cuts to the agency that runs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have contributed to the decline — making it more difficult to apply and causing people who are eligible to be denied."

Was it really that bad? The opposition leader managed to get himself elected after all.. #Hungary

"The Orban regime". There is that word again..

Poynter: "The ongoing clash between newsrooms and their unions over the implementation of artificial intelligence escalated Wednesday as workers at ProPublica staged a 24-hour strike... The union is seeking seniority protections in the case of layoffs — which it says are increasingly likely in an AI-driven industry — and “just cause,” a basic stipulation that prevents companies from disciplining or firing workers without sufficient reason...

[P]ivot to AI has been a major sticking point in negotiations.. mirroring conflicts across the country between newsrooms and their unions. On Tuesday, union leaders at The New York Times sent top leadership a letter over concerns that the company’s AI policies were “woefully inadequate” and had led to errors like a book review that was found to have similar language to that of a Guardian review."