Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Even worse was the suggestion by Grammarly’s A.I. version of me to replace the first sentence of the news article with an anecdotal opening describing a fictional person named Laura whose privacy had been violated. “Laura, a patient searching for relief from a chronic condition, clicks through her hospital’s website to schedule an appointment. In just a few moments, her most private medical details — her reason for visiting, her doctor’s name and even the treatment she seeks — are quietly sent to Facebook, without her knowledge,” the bot suggested with a button allowing the user to paste that excerpt straight into the article. Replacing a factual sentence with an imagined story about a person who doesn’t exist is not only bad editing. It’s a deception that could end my career as a journalist (or the career of any journalist who took that terrible advice). And this is the problem with A.I. It doesn’t know truth from fiction. It doesn’t know an investigative news article from an offhand comment. It flattens all content into word associations. What Grammarly made wasn’t a doppelgänger. As the writer Ingrid Burrington wrote on Bluesky, it was a sloppelgänger — A.I. slop masquerading as a person. And it must be stopped." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/opinion/ai-doppelganger-deepfake-grammarly.html #AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #Writing #Hallucinations

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔 The Guardian talked to a dozen humanities professors about teaching in the age of AI. Most described the experience in despairing terms. One said generative AI is the bane of her existence. Another said she wishes she could push ChatGPT off a cliff. 92% of students now report using AI for schoolwork. Some professors have resorted to oral exams, handwritten notebooks, and requiring students to submit photos of their notes. One injects random words like "broccoli" into assignments to catch students who paste prompts directly into AI without reading them.

My Take
The thing that stuck with me is the professor who assigned students to visit a museum, look at a painting for ten minutes, and write a few paragraphs about the experience. A student showed up on a Monday when the museum was closed, then turned in an AI-generated reflection anyway. The assignment was designed to be impossible to fake because it was supposed to be personal. It didn't matter.

I don't know what the answer is here. The professors are trying everything they can think of and none of it scales. You can require handwritten work and oral exams but that means smaller classes and more staff, which means more money, which isn't coming. Meanwhile universities are partnering with OpenAI and announcing AI-fluent curriculums while faculty figure it out alone. The worry isn't just cheating. It's that we're running an experiment on an entire generation's ability to think, and nobody's sure what comes out the other side.

Hedgie🤗

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning

"Judged from an economic perspective, despite the exuberance of the Israeli stock market, the course of the Israeli state is highly questionable. It costs a great deal of money – two billion NIS a day in direct expenditure and five to six billion indirectly – and will require significant continued American financial aid. The government’s logic is that this will be balanced by the economic dividends: sky-rocketing profits from arms sales, now that cutting-edge Israeli weapons are being showcased on the battlefield, not to mention the prospect of Iranian oil reserves and greater access to those of the Gulf states, as they come to realize they need Israel’s protection. Yet there is no certainty this will make up for the financial strain; the same goes for money spent on settlements and the promotion of messianic Judaism in lieu of healthcare and other social priorities.

There are further reasons why Israel will struggle to pursue its strategy over the long term. Campaigns like this in the past were abandoned the moment they faced difficulties. Loss of American life, pressure from other countries in the region, public opinion in the US, the potential resilience of the Iranian regime and continued resistance of the Palestinians may all shift the balance. An invasion of Lebanon, judging by past attempts, will benefit no one. Much depends on the global coalition that fortifies Israel’s wars: the arms industry, multinational corporations, megalomaniac leaders of powerful states, Christian and Jewish Zionist lobbies, the timid governments in the global north as well as corrupt Arab regimes in the Middle East. What is certain is that before this fiasco ends, Israel will inflict a great deal of suffering – on the Iranians, the Lebanese and the Palestinians."

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/on-the-warpath

#Israel #Zionism #MiddleEast #Iran #Palestine #Lebanon

RT @allenholub
"Gartner predicts that by next year, half of the companies that fired workers for AI are going to hire them back. Also, 9 months ago, Microsoft proudly proclaimed that 30% of their code was written by AI, and since then, we've seen some of the worst software issues at the company in its
history."

This video is well worth watching. It's a balanced, real-world look at the effectiveness of AI (across many disciplines, not just software dev) and its impact on work, substantiated by a well-designed study that actually compares UI to human workers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3kaLM8Oj4o

"At an Amazon fulfillment center in Spain, we used a flurry of brief walkouts late last year to force the company to improve wages and time off.

We struck for three days in November and in December in a series of “flexible strikes,” timed to hit production with intermittent walkouts during the holiday “peak” season. On December 22, the union committee announced a settlement, negotiated through government mediators.

The facility, RMU1 in the city of Murcia, employed 2,000 workers at the time, and our union the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) was one of four unions that represented them. [European countries don’t have the same “exclusive representation” system as the U.S., so multiple unions can have a presence at the same worksite. –Editors]

About 75 percent of the workforce, made up of workers from Spain and immigrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Morocco, participated in the strike, reaching beyond the ranks of the CGT to include other union members.

Our experience shows what’s possible, even at a multinational corporation designed to neutralize organizing. Building from below, workers can organize a well-planned strike—over the objections of more conservative unions—draw on their knowledge of the production process, hit the company where it hurts the most, and wrest real gains.

Here’s how we got Amazon to negotiate with us when it didn’t want to."

https://labornotes.org/amazon-workers-spain-cgt-strategy

#Spain #Amazon #GGT #Murcia #CGT #Labor #WageSlavery #ClassWarfare

"Grammarly’s “expert review” feature offers to give users writing advice “inspired by” subject matter experts, including recently deceased professors, as Wired reported on Wednesday. When I tried the feature out myself, I found some experts that came as a surprise for a different reason — one of them was my boss.

The AI-generated feedback included comments that appeared to be from The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, as well as editor-at-large David Pierce and senior editors Sean Hollister and Tom Warren, none of whom gave Grammarly permission to include them in the “expert reviews.”

The feature, which launched in August, claims to help you “sharpen your message through the lens of industry-relevant perspectives.” When users select the “expert review” button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions “inspired by” related experts. Those “industry-relevant perspectives” include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.

The Verge found numerous other tech journalists named in the feature, as well, including former Verge editors Casey Newton and Joanna Stern, former Verge writer Monica Chin, Wired’s Lauren Goode, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Jason Schreier, The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill, The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany, PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon, Gizmodo’s Raymond Wong, Digital Foundry founder Richard Leadbetter, Tom’s Guide editor-in-chief Mark Spoonauer, former Rock Paper Shotgun editor-in-chief Katharine Castle, and former IGN news director Kat Bailey. The descriptions for some experts contain inaccuracies, such as outdated job titles, which could have been accurately updated had Superhuman asked those people for permission to reference their work."

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/890921/grammarly-ai-expert-reviews

#AI #GenerativeAI #Grammarly

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔 OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent that exploded to 200,000 GitHub stars in weeks, has become a security nightmare. In five weeks it accumulated 9 disclosed vulnerabilities, over 2,200 malicious add-ons in its marketplace, and 40,000 internet-exposed instances. Researchers found that 93% of those instances had authentication bypassed, and the project triggered 8 of 10 vulnerability classes that security experts warned about for AI agents.

The attack chain works like this: malicious add-ons in the marketplace instruct the AI agent to present fake setup dialogs to users, tricking them into entering passwords. The agent becomes the social engineering tool. One campaign distributed macOS malware by having the agent itself ask users for their credentials. Users trust their AI assistant, so they comply.

My Take
I believe this is what happens when something goes viral before anyone thinks through what they're actually deploying. Developers gave OpenClaw shell access to their computers, connected it to their email and Slack, handed it cloud API keys, and then installed add-ons from a community marketplace that had basically no vetting. Over 40% of the add-ons that got audited had serious security issues. The project went from weekend hack to 200,000 users before anyone built the guardrails.

The attack method here is new. The malware doesn't trick the human directly anymore, it tricks the AI agent into tricking the human. When your assistant asks you for a password to finish an installation, you probably enter it because you trust it. To anyone investigating later, it looks like you voluntarily installed the software. The agent's role is invisible. I've been writing about AI tools being deployed faster than security can keep up, and this is that problem at scale. If anyone at your company has been running OpenClaw, I'd treat it as compromised until proven otherwise.

Hedgie🤗

https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2029337090844946791

"Then, on Tuesday morning, came the big one. YouGov — Britain’s most reputable pollster — put them on 21% of the vote and in second place, just behind Reform: five points ahead of both Labour and the Tories. In all likelihood, Reform and the Greens will have more members than Labour come the local elections in May. And, for those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again. YouGov gives them a 6% lead over Reform among all Brits under 65.

“For those looking to dismiss the Greens as a party of students, bohemians and unemployed artists, think again.”

Given the avalanche of attacks and negative campaigning against the Greens in recent weeks, from both the Right and the centre, how is any of this possible? After all, similar attacks paralysed Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after 2017, and led to a drubbing two years later. Yet Polanski seems to go from strength to strength, leading to panic among some on the Right, with much of Westminster struggling to understand exactly why the Greens are soaring so high."

https://unherd.com/2026/03/how-the-greens-stole-reforms-mojo/

#UK #ReformUK #Farage #GreenParty #Greens

RT @BenjaminNorton
This is incredible: Spain is the only EU country that has opposed the US war of aggression against Iran.

Spain refuses to let the US use its military bases to attack Iran, so Trump threatened an economic embargo against it.

And now the BlackRock executive who runs Germany on behalf of Washington and Wall Street, Friedrich Merz, said he supports Emperor Trump's attack on another EU member.

As an excuse, Merz claimed it's because Spain refuses to increase its military spending to 5% of GDP. But that's not what this is really about. They're threatening to punish Spain for refusing to support a US war of aggression.

European "solidarity" is a myth. The EU is run by vassals of the US empire who sell out their countries to Wall Street.

(By the way, Merz is a multimillionaire who ran the German arm of BlackRock and owns two private jets.)

https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/2029006394201186489

It's way easier for lazy politicians to enact laws to outlaw, censor, and surveil under the guise of a moral panic than to enforce antitrust regulations and interoperability and algorithmic transparency mandates...

"While social media bans may seem like a prudent measure to protect children, they are not only ineffective, they endanger both children and adults. There is little evidence that social media is driving any type of widespread mental health crisis in children. Studies have repeatedly shown the opposite. Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity.

And while some claim the laws would curb big tech’s power, only the largest tech companies have the resources to shoulder the extensive costs of age verification systems. Non-profit and indie platforms could be forced to close, consolidating big tech’s power further. Mass surveillance systems, once constructed, could also be easily leveraged by governments and bad actors.

If we want to fix the problems with social media, the place to start is through comprehensive data-privacy reform and consumer protections. Governments could also take action to break up big tech companies and prosecute them for anti-competitive behaviour. Lawmakers, who claim to care about children, could pass broader social and economic policies that we know would meaningfully improve children’s lives. Social media is a lifeline, especially for marginalised youth such as LGBTQ+ teens. Any policies that limit online access should centre on the most vulnerable children and adults.

To enact the social media bans being proposed around the world requires some system of age verification, which inherently means expanding surveillance technology."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/02/ban-children-social-media-biometic-data-surveilled

#AgeVerification #SocialMedia #Politics #Censorship #Surveillance

"According to a source familiar with the negotiations, on Friday morning, Anthropic received word that Hegseth’s team would make a major concession. The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropic’s AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loophole-y phrases like as appropriate—suggesting that the terms were subject to change, based on the administration’s interpretation of a given situation.

Anthropic’s team was relieved to hear that the government would be willing to remove those words, but one big problem remained: On Friday afternoon, Anthropic learned that the Pentagon still wanted to use the company’s AI to analyze bulk data collected from Americans. That could include information such as the questions you ask your favorite chatbot, your Google search history, your GPS-tracked movements, and your credit-card transactions, all of which could be cross-referenced with other details about your life. Anthropic’s leadership told Hegseth’s team that was a bridge too far, and the deal fell apart. Soon after, Hegseth directed the U.S. military’s contractors, suppliers, and partners to stop doing business with Anthropic. The list of companies that contract with the military is extensive, and includes Amazon, the company that supplies much of Anthropic’s computing infrastructure. The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the company’s statement addressing Hegseth’s remarks."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/inside-anthropics-killer-robot-dispute-with-the-pentagon/686200/

#USA #Trump #Pentagon #DoD #DroneWarfare #AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #Claude

RT @ChrisRMcGuire
Reuters reports that an object struck an AWS data center in the UAE, causing a fire and shutting it down. Assuming this was an Iranian drone strike, it is the first time a commercial data center was physically targeted in a conflict. It won’t be the last.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/amazons-cloud-unit-reports-fire-after-objects-hit-uae-data-center-2026-03-01/

RT @lukOlejnik
Let’s speak about the future of analytical assessment using AI Agents. A week before the strikes, on February 22, my AI agent
@openclaw assessed a ~70-75% probability of a US strike on Iran within two weeks. It identified five escalation levels already underway and predicted the attack would come.
What it got right:
Timing. Strikes landed on February 28, six days into the forecast window. The bot flagged the next 48-72 hours as critical for an Iranian counter-offer. Iran’s offer didn’t deliver. Strikes followed.
Escalation model. The bot described five levels. Levels 1-2 (cyber and information operations) were already active. Today we know Israel (reportedly) launched large cyber operations alongside the kinetic strikes, exactly as the bot anticipated. The actual operation landed between the bot’s Level 3 (limited strikes) and Level 4 (sustained air campaign), with the Pentagon saying operations would last “a few days.”
Indicators. The bot cited three converging layers: military (personnel withdrawals from Gulf bases, identical pattern to June 2025), diplomatic (25+ countries issuing evacuation notices, UK embassy closed), and political (Trump advisors signaling 90% chance of kinetic action). All three held.
Targeting. The bot predicted nuclear and military infrastructure. The actual strikes hit government, military, intelligence, and IRGC targets, with regime decapitation added on top.
What it missed. The bot didn’t predict the m attempt to kill Khamenei and Pezeshkian directly. It also estimated invasion probability at under 2%, which remains correct so far. It flagged UK base restrictions as a complication for sustained bombing, but the operation proceeded regardless.
70-75% one week out, on a six-day fuse. The bot read the indicators correctly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://clawdint.com/

"We found that reliability has improved only modestly over 18 months, while accuracy improved substantially. All three major providers cluster together, so this appears to be an industry-wide limitation (though there are some cases where Anthropic’s models outperform OpenAI’s and Google’s).

More specifically, we measured the following criteria:

Consistency: Agents that can solve a task often fail on repeated attempts under identical conditions. Many models have trouble giving a consistent answer, with outcome consistency scores ranging from 30% to 75% across the board.

Robustness: Most models handle genuine technical failures (server crashes, API timeouts) gracefully. But if we rephrase the instructions with the same semantic meaning, performance drops substantially.

Predictability: Agents are not good at knowing when they’re wrong. This is the weakest dimension across the board. When agents report confidence, it often carries little signal. On one benchmark, most models couldn’t distinguish their correct predictions from incorrect ones better than chance.

Safety: Recent models are noticeably better at avoiding constraint violations, though financial errors, such as incorrect charges, remain a common failure mode. We use safety narrowly to mean bounded harm when failures occur, not broader concerns like alignment. We are still iterating on how we measure safety, so we report it separately from the aggregate reliability score.

Impact of scaling: Bigger models aren’t uniformly more reliable. Scaling up improves some dimensions (calibration, robustness) but can hurt consistency. Larger models with richer behavioral repertoires sometimes show more run-to-run variability.

Our view is that reliability lags capability, and that reliability will remain a barrier to deployment unless researchers and developers focus effort on improving reliability as a separate dimension from accuracy."

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-ai

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AISafety #Science #Reliability

Go headless:

"If you absolutely have to ship UI as part of your project, the best way to approach it is to make the UI optional and modular. Here’s how you can do it:

- Separate UI and Core Logic: Create two distinct packages: one for the core functionality and one for the UI components. This allows developers to choose whether they want to use the provided UI or build their own while still leveraging the core logic of the SDK.
- Provide Clear Documentation: Offer detailed instructions for implementing the SDK with and without the built-in UI. Include code samples and guidelines for developers who want to customize or replace the default UI.
- Make the UI Customizable: If you include a UI package, ensure it is fully customizable. Allow developers to override styles, colors, fonts, and even layouts to match their app’s branding and design.
- Design for Integration: Ensure the UI components follow Android’s Material Design guidelines and can adapt seamlessly to different themes, orientations, and screen sizes. Use isolated namespaces to avoid resource conflicts.
- Support Analytics Hooks: Provide APIs or callbacks that allow developers to integrate their analytics and tracking solutions into the SDK’s UI. This ensures that they can still collect data and maintain insights into user behavior.
- Offer a “Headless Mode”: For advanced users, offer a “headless” mode that exposes only the core logic, enabling developers to integrate it into their own UI without relying on your SDK’s visuals.

An ideal SDK with UI should have at least 2 importable modules, 1 for the core functionality, and one for UI."

https://proandroiddev.com/sdk-development-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly-9e9ab2a81697

#SDK #SDKDevelopment #HeadlessSDK #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #DeveloperExperience

"The current fad is to create Claude Skills, Copilot instructions, Cursor rules, and so on, so that developers and users can use your products through LLMs in a way that’s easier than just feeding raw documentation as context. In a way, this is quite similar to packaging docs as if they were Nintendo cartridges or floppy disks with some cool cheat codes for a game: docs-as-data. You plug docs in, the agent learns kung-fu.

Seeing developers coming up with agentic helpers fed by docs whose provenance, quality, and maintenance is unknown, eager to just use context as some sort of agentic boilerplate, makes me upset. As a tech writer you should own the instructions, as you should own the words in a REST API or the prompts in an MCP server. All that is docs. It doesn’t matter that it’s going to be consumed by AI. It’s still docs. It’ll always be docs.

Start creating skills to automate and enhance your own work. We call them “skills” today, but they could be “agentic docs” tomorrow. "

https://passo.uno/new-habits-tech-writers-ai-age/

#TechnicalWriting #Automation #AI #LLMs #GenerativeAI #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

"The Cuban Revolution has survived two-thirds of a century under US blockade but is today under greater pressure than ever. US government actions including the January 3 kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, assaults on Caribbean sea-lanes, and a January 29 executive order imposing steep tariffs on states that supply oil to Cuba are all aimed at cutting off Cuba’s fuel supply and bringing the country to its knees.

Many reports tell of a dire humanitarian situation, with now-frequent power cuts and widespread shortages, worse even than in past crisis moments. Donald Trump and anti-communist ideologues like Secretary of State Marco Rubio seem determined to push Cuba into chaos. Threats against Cuba’s trade partners are designed to give the United States the final say over the island’s fate.

Still, Cuba does not stand alone. The Nuestra América Convoy has called for an international solidarity effort to bring humanitarian aid to the island on March 21. One of the organizers is David Adler, co–general coordinator of the Progressive International, and a veteran of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the US pressure on Cuba, its ripping up of international law, and the need for practical solidarity with the Cuban people."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/cuba-trump-nuestra-america-convoy

#USA #Trump #Cuba #Imperialism #NuestraAmerica

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs

"We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator. We then design attacks for the closed-world setting. Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives. Compared to prior deanonymization work (e.g., on the Netflix prize) that required structured data or manual feature engineering, our approach works directly on raw user content across arbitrary platforms. We construct three datasets with known ground-truth data to evaluate our attacks. The first links Hacker News to LinkedIn profiles, using cross-platform references that appear in the profiles. Our second dataset matches users across Reddit movie discussion communities; and the third splits a single user’s Reddit history in time to create two pseudonymous profiles to be matched. In each setting, LLM-based methods substantially outperform classical baselines, achieving up to 68% recall at 90% precision compared to near 0% for the best non-LLM method. Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered."

https://arxiv.org/html/2602.16800v1

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Anonymity #Privacy #Deanonymization

I think I can now totally agree with this argument. It's very myopic to think that a bunch of AI agents can develop and maintain a fully fledged SaaS platform while maintaining a production-ready level of quality for thousands of users around the world...

"I’ve worked in or around SaaS since 2012, and I know the industry well. I may not be able to code, but I take the time to speak with software engineers so that I understand what things actually do and how “impressive” they are. Similarly, I make the effort to understand the underlying business models in a way that I’m not sure everybody else is trying to, and if I’m wrong, please show me an analysis of the financial condition of OpenAI or Anthropic from a booster. You won’t find one, because they’re not interested in interacting with reality.

So, despite all of this being very obvious, it’s clear that the markets and an alarming number of people in the media simply do not know what they are talking about or are intentionally avoiding thinking about it. The “AI replaces software” story is literally “Anthropic has released a product and now the resulting industry is selling off,” such as when it launched a cybersecurity tool that could check for vulnerabilities (a product that has existed in some form for nearly a decade) causing a sell-off in cybersecurity stocks like Crowdstrike
(...)
There is no rational basis for anything about this sell-off other than that our financial media and markets do not appear to understand the very basic things about the stuff they invest in. Software may seem complex, but (especially in these cases) it’s really quite simple: investors are conflating “an AI model can spit out code” with “an AI model can create the entire experience of what we know as ‘software,’ or is close enough that we have to start freaking out.”"

https://www.wheresyoured.at/on-nvidia-and-analyslop/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AIAgents #AIBubble #Nvidia #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

RT @TheHackersNews
Attackers are stealing encrypted data under a “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” strategy.

Store it now. Decrypt it when quantum machines mature, possibly between 2030 and 2035. Security Navigator 2026 outlines a five-step PQC migration plan and breach data.

🔗 Read → https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/expert-recommends-prepare-for-pqc-right.html

RT @lukOlejnik
My comments for @Telegraph on autonomous weapons, AI and the Pentagon standoff with @Anthropic. The US has no binding prohibition on lethal autonomous weapon systems. AI-powered weapons such as mass drone swarms and loitering munitions that would only require a human in an observer role are close to reality.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/26/the-one-man-stopping-trump-from-building-killer-ai/

RT @jasminewsun
200+ Google and OpenAI staff have signed this petition to share Anthropic's red lines for the Pentagon's use of AI

let's find out if this is a race to the top or the bottom

https://notdivided.org

"With a hammer, harm is external and obvious, like a bent nail, a bruised thumb. In this cognitive environment, harm can be real and insidiously subtle. Once an LLM has offered a line of reasoning or even a clever turn of phrase, it becomes part of your mental terrain. You don’t just receive information; you adopt it as a starting point for your next thought. And that's what makes AI something other than just a tool...

Certainly, this is powerful, even exhilarating. The environment can change your cognitive perspective and trajectory. But it also carries a hidden cost or even accumulates a type of debt. It can smooth away the very frictions that make human thought generative. Confusion, hesitation, and error are not accidents of cognition—they are the mechanisms by which we refine our understanding. They are what turn information into meaning."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202509/maybe-ai-was-never-a-tool

#AI #GenerativeAI #CriticalThinking #Automation

"The United States is waging a new cold war against China. This has been openly admitted in Washington for several years.

The First and Second Cold Wars are different in some significant ways. The ideological split is not exactly the same.

The United States is capitalist and constitutes the heart of the capitalist world-system, whereas China is socialist. However, the People’s Republic of China is not the Soviet Union; it does not lead a socialist bloc of countries, and Beijing has been clear that it does not seek to “export” revolution.

“We will not import other countries’ models, and will not export the China model”, President Xi Jinping asserted in 2017 — although he added, “We will provide more opportunities for the world through our development”.

With that established, it should be stressed that just because China is very different from the USSR does not mean that there is no ideological aspect of Cold War Two.

There are unambiguous ideological differences between the US and China, and each promotes a very different vision of international relations.

The Second Cold War, therefore, will still have an enormous impact on the new global order that is being shaped.

In short, the political model that Washington seeks to impose on the world is the exact opposite of the political model being advocated by Beijing."

https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/p/us-unipolarity-china-multipolarity-vision-global-order

#Multilateralism #Unipolarity #Multipolarity #USA #China #Imperialism

"New research shows that behaviors that occur at the very lowest levels of the network stack make encryption—in any form, not just those that have been broken in the past—incapable of providing client isolation, an encryption-enabled protection promised by all router makers, that is intended to block direct communication between two or more connected clients.

The isolation can effectively be nullified through AirSnitch, the name the researchers gave to a series of attacks that capitalize on the newly discovered weaknesses. Various forms of AirSnitch work across a broad range of routers, including those from Netgear, D-Link, Ubiquiti, Cisco, and those running DD-WRT and OpenWrt.

AirSnitch “breaks worldwide Wi-Fi encryption, and it might have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks,” Xin’an Zhou, the lead author of the research paper, said in an interview. “Advanced attacks can build on our primitives to [perform] cookie stealing, DNS and cache poisoning. Our research physically wiretaps the wire altogether so these sophisticated attacks will work. It’s really a threat to worldwide network security.” Zhou presented his research on Wednesday at the 2026 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium.

Paper co-author Mathy Vanhoef, said a few hours after this post went live that the attack may be better described as a Wi-Fi encryption “bypass,” “in the sense that we can bypass client isolation. We don’t break Wi-Fi authentication or encryption. Crypto is often bypassed instead of broken. And we bypass it ;)” People who don’t rely on client or network isolation, he added, are safe."

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/02/new-airsnitch-attack-breaks-wi-fi-encryption-in-homes-offices-and-enterprises/

#CyberSecurity #Wifi #Encryption #AirSnitch

"A software engineer’s earnest effort to steer his new DJI robot vacuum with a video game controller inadvertently granted him a sneak peak into thousands of people’s homes. While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera feeds, microphone audio, maps, and status data from nearly 7,000 other vacuums across 24 countries. The backend security bug effectively exposed an army of internet-connected robots that, in the wrong hands, could have turned into surveillance tools, all without their owners ever knowing. Luckily, Azdoufal chose not to exploit that. Instead, he shared his findings with The Verge, which quickly contacted DJI to report the flaw. While DJI tells Popular Science the issue has been “resolved,” the dramatic episode underscores warnings from cybersecurity experts who have long-warned that internet-connected robots and other smart home devices present attractive targets for hackers." https://www.popsci.com/technology/robot-vacuum-army/ #AI #IoT #CyberSecurity #DJII #RobotVaccum

"At the heart of the Chatrie case are legal orders known as geofence warrants. This controversial tool allows police to demand location data from tech companies (usually Google) to see every device in a specific area at a specific time. Imagine drawing a digital fence around a crime scene and demanding a list of every phone that crossed into it.

These demands can reveal precise details about people’s movements and locations. Authorities can pinpoint where someone stood within a couple of yards and whether they were on the first or second floor of a building.

But geofence warrants are also imprecise: They sweep up the movements not just of suspects but also of innocent people who happen to be within the digital fence. Demanding location data for a 150-yard radius of a bank in the hour before it was robbed, for example, may show the movements of people who worked at the bank, visited the psychiatrist’s office next door, worshipped at the church on the neighboring block, or dropped into the nearby strip club."

https://freedom.press/issues/supreme-court-could-greenlight-geofence-warrants/

#USA #PressFreedom #Journalism #Surveillance #Geolocation #GeofenceWarrants

RT @gabriel_zucman
The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering

The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

https://x.com/gabriel_zucman/status/2023046025162940692

RT @jasonhickel
What's most repulsive about Rubio's speech, and the warm embrace it received from the European ruling class, is that its only vision for "Western civilization" is a future of endless imperialist violence.

They have nothing else to offer to their citizens, or to the world. No vision for addressing social and ecological crises, no vision for improving people's lives, no vision for human progress... no other vision for "greatness" besides violence and plunder.

It is, in fact, the antithesis of civilization. It is barbarism.

https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/2023435161606447542

RT @RnaudBertrand
2 years ago I wrote that humanoid robots will end up being "THE product that will symbolize China's rise to world preeminent power status."

Look at what humanoids in China are capable of now (this was the Chinese new year gala last night, https://x.com/WhileTravelling/status/2023416426984288506/video/1) 👇

Most impressively, you can buy one of these Unitree robots TODAY for $13.5k (https://shop.unitree.com/products/unitree-g1?srsltid=AfmBOoqbvG6ilxJx2DVCuh4nhzGz6nwupiNWbkqqzTgg4ZJhZ0d-_fgC), which isn't the case for any US competitor: for all the hype Elon's Optimus isn't remotely ready for commercialization (Elon says it'll need another 2 years: https://axios.com/2026/01/22/elon-musk-tesla-optimus-robots).

Which means that this is an industry, which will end up being one of the largest industries ever (dixit Jensen Huang: https://instagram.com/reel/DK0agCDS1VQ/), in which China is easily 3 years ahead of the US in terms of technology (given that Unitree humanoids, among others, have been mass produced for more than one year).

Which is a lifetime at the pace at which technology moves, and a gap that continuously widens given that China's humanoid field is more dynamic than the US: the city of Shenzhen alone, with 8 humanoid robot companies (https://x.com/i/status/1991734168896827817), outcompetes the entire US industry today.

The only thing, funnily, in which US robotics companies outcompete China is market capitalization. For instance Figure AI, which - like Optimus - has yet to commercialize a single humanoid, is valued at $39B (https://figure.ai/news/series-c) when Unitree is valued at $1.6B (https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3344368397190018).

Which shows again the extent to which tech valuations are divorced from reality - in the US and China both, just in opposite directions.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2023606882116812924

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔 Global data center power demand is projected to hit 1,596 terawatt-hours by 2035, a 255% increase from 2025 levels. The US leads with demand expected to surge 144% to 430 terawatt-hours. China is projected to rise 255% to 397 terawatt-hours, while Europe jumps 303% to 274 terawatt-hours.

New data centers coming online between now and 2030 alone will need more than 600 terawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power roughly 60 million homes.

My Take
The numbers are staggering, but what's already happening to electricity bills is more immediate. Wholesale electricity costs have jumped as much as 267% in areas near data centers compared to five years ago. In the mid-Atlantic region, capacity charges rose 833% for 2025-2026, and an independent monitor found data center demand made up 63% of the total power capacity bill. Electricity prices rose 6.9% in 2025, more than double the inflation rate, and Goldman Sachs says prices will keep climbing through the end of the decade.

Here's what bothers me. A Yale Climate Connections analysis found that between 2020 and 2024, residential electricity prices increased 25% while data centers and commercial users saw only modest increases. Industrial users actually paid lower prices than two years ago. Households are subsidizing the AI buildout through higher bills while the companies driving the demand negotiate discounts. Virginia and New Jersey just elected governors who campaigned partly on this issue. States are now scrambling to pass laws making data centers pay their own way, but those rules can't fix the short-term problem of demand outpacing supply. The infrastructure costs are already being passed to consumers.

Hedgie🤗

https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2023559772398841980

É óbvio que as pessoas têm todo o direito a recusar-se a trabalhar em empresas que obrigam os seus funcionários a utilizar ferramentas de Inteligência Artificial (IA). Parece-me igualmente óbvio que essas empresas estão a cometer uma verdadeira idiotice se necessitam de obrigar os seus funcionários a utilizar IA.

Na verdade, isso é a PIOR FORMA de promover a adopção de ferramentas de IA. Aliás, a mensagem implícita nessa obrigação é essa: Essas ferramentas são tão más, tão ineficientes e tão improdutivas que é preciso obrigar as pessoas a utilizarem-nas nas suas tarefas de trabalho.

Seja como for, muito além dessa discussão maniqueísta típica dos EUA entre prós-IA e anti-IA - discussão essa que, a bem de verdade, me parece totalmente desinteressante por se agarrar a um discurso generalizante e abstracto, desvinculado de cenários de utilização real e ferramentas/modelos concretos -, parece-me bem mais interessante recorrer a metáforas históricas com tecnologias que surgiram anteriormente.

E as metáforas que neste momento me ocorrem são duas. A primeira remete para a altura em que tiveram início os voos regulares comerciais atravessando o mesmo continente, por exemplo entre Nova Iorque e Los Angeles ou, a nível europeu, entre Lisboa e Berlim.

A segunda remete para o início da Internet de banda larga, via ADSL. Ou muito me engano ou parece-me que desde o final do ano passado, com a chegada do Claude Opus 4.5, chegámos a uma etapa da história da evolução dos LLMs muito semelhante a esses dois pontos históricos.

Mesmo com os primeiros voos comerciais regulares a atravessar a América do Norte ou a Europa, muita gente continuou a preferir fazer essa viagem de comboio ou mesmo de automóvel privado. Mas com os anos, muito mais gente passou a considerar que lhes convinha mais poupar tempo numa viagem de avião, mesmo que isso significasse não poder apreciar a paisagem ou parar pelo caminho.

"With a determination underappreciated in Trump’s Washington, Xi decided long ago never to let China’s AI sector become “addicted” to American technology. He sees the risks of dependence as outweighing the benefits; any lead in AI that isn’t grounded in China producing its own physical components is too fragile to be worth having. And he believes that Chinese tech firms can innovate even if they do not have topflight American chips, in keeping with his long-standing view that periods of hardship make China stronger. It may seem contradictory, but because AI is so important to Xi—he has called technology “the main battlefield of international competition”—he wants to force the country’s tech firms to create a self-reliant system, even if it means slowing their near-term progress, in order to gain a more durable long-term advantage. Even as Trump approved sales of the H200, Xi considered providing as much as $70 billion in additional support for China’s chip industry, in part to accelerate his effort to produce advanced semiconductor manufacturing machinery as good as that of the global leader, the Dutch firm ASML. But this equipment, often called “the world’s most complex machine,” may be the single most challenging technology to replicate domestically, far harder than solar panels, electric vehicles, or other Chinese success stories. It is a high-stakes gamble.

To understand why Xi is making these decisions, there is no better guide than the Harvard sociologist Ya-Wen Lei’s The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China. Her masterful study of what she calls China’s regime of “techno-development”—the model of “[science-and-technology]-oriented socioeconomic development” that has gradually replaced the prior model of “labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing”—makes clear that China’s leaders see advanced technology as the country’s lifeblood:"

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/26/when-the-chips-are-down-china-us-ai/

#China #USA #AIChips #Nvidia #AI #Huawei #Tariffs #TradeWar

"As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have swarmed cities across the United States, American politics has appeared to enter a new phase, one in which armed federal forces turn civilian neighborhoods into active conflict zones. Part of what is driving this political shift is a potent technical infrastructure: ICE operations are now expedited by mobile surveillance and targeting systems, where agents’ most powerful weapon can fit in the palm of their hands.

Recent reporting has revealed ICE is relying on at least two applications to guide its crackdown. The first is ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement), a new geospatial system built by the data analytics firm Palantir for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and designed for use on smartphones and tablets. ELITE “populates a map with deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a user manual published late last month.

The second is Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition application manufactured by the biometrics company NEC that allows immigration enforcement officers to identify both citizens and undocumented migrants. ICE and other DHS agents have reportedly photographed and scanned the faces of Americans in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago — images that are cross-checked with biometric databases, compiled into dossiers, and stored for up to 15 years.

It’s no coincidence that, reporting on ICE’s incursion into Minnesota, New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen described an “occupation designed to punish and terrorize.” The technologies supporting their operations illustrate how thoroughly ICE is following in Israel’s footsteps: both ELITE and Mobile Fortify bear a striking resemblance to mobile targeting applications Israeli forces have..."

https://www.972mag.com/ice-immigration-israeli-occupation-surveillance/

#USA #Trump #Immigration #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState #Fascism #Palantir #Israel #FacialRecognition

"The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-social-media.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MFA.etW4.BLWmjAEoNuxe&smid=nytcore-ios-share

#USA #Trump #SocialMedia #DHS #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState #BigTech #StateOfException #Authoritarianism

"The memes, the trolling, and the Epstein video slop are all a cultural defense mechanism amid a crisis of impunity. The files are more proof that elites of all persuasions seem plenty comfortable saying the quiet part out loud or engaging in egregious, shameless behavior, banking on a culture that has given up on demanding consequences. When faced with evidence of the worst kind of sexual deviancy and conspiracy and no consequences, who could blame a bystander for choosing to hold nothing in their heart at all?

A convincing argument I’ve seen for the prevalence of nihilism, especially politically, is that younger generations have mostly known only political and economic dysfunction.

Five years out from the GameStop ordeal, you can see a similar dynamic shot through the economy, in cryptocurrency speculation and graft, in vapid meme coins and an obsession with gambling and prediction markets. These elements—described as financial nihilism—are especially prevalent in younger generations, who feel that the path of predictable progress (homeownership, access to a thriving job market out of college) no longer exists. “Faced with that reality, taking a gamble on Fartcoin or betting how many times Elon Musk tweets in a week can feel strangely rational,” the Gen Z economic writer Kyla Scanlon wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Scanlon further argues that this kind of nihilism is “an attempt to find personal agency in a system that’s increasingly denied it to them.” Online, young people wrap their humor in so many layers of irony that figuring out what they’re talking about can seem like a wild goose chase. The posters want people to research and agonize—it only serves to drive more attention to the joke. And so you get nonsensical memes (“six-seven”) and brain rot as Oxford University Press’s word of the year in 2024...”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/02/internet-nihilism-crisis/686010/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyXqgVL6VjGwYwL3Yc7w9iUE\

#Nihilism #Memes #SocialMedia #4Chan #Cryptocurrencies

"If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markd_own_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet. At a technical level, it was also easy enough to implement that John could write the code himself to make it work with Movable Type, his publishing tool of choice. (Within days, people had implemented the same feature for most of the other blogging tools of the era; these days, virtually every app that you can type text into ships with Markdown support as a feature on day one.)

Prior to launch, John had enlisted our mutual friend, the late, dearly missed Aaron Swartz, as a beta tester. In addition to being extremely fluent in every detail of the blogging technologies of the time, Aaron was, most notably, seventeen years old. And though Aaron’s activism and untimely passing have resulted in him having been turned into something of a mythological figure, one of the greatest things about Aaron was that he could be a total pain in the ass, which made him terrific at reporting bugs in your software. (One of the last email conversations I ever had with Aaron was him pointing out some obscure bugs in an open source app I was working on at the time.) No surprise, Aaron instantly understood both the potential and the power of Markdown, and was a top-tier beta tester for the technology as it was created. His astute feedback helped finely hone the final product so it was ready for the world, and when Markdown quietly debuted in March of 2004, it was clear that text files around the web were about to get a permanent upgrade."
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
#Markdown #AI #GenerativeAI #SoftwareDevelopment #HTML #WebDevelopment #MarkUp #Documentation #SoftwareDocumentation

RT @SceneSallard
Imagine being a bright-eyed J-School grad eager to launch your reporting career, and the editor of Cleveland's metro daily puts you on blast for wanting to be a journalist instead of an AI content farmer. https://cleveland.com/news/2026/02/journalism-schools-are-teaching-fear-of-the-future-letter-from-the-editor.html

"When we write documentation, we often assume someone will read it top to bottom. Even when we skim, we start at the top, absorb context, build a mental model. And we infer stuff, like if you’re reading design system docs, you probably already know what a design system is.

AI agents don’t work like this. They retrieve the most relevant chunk based on semantic similarity and produce a response from that slice. If the definition is three paragraphs in and the agent retrieves paragraph one, it fills in the gaps.

That’s where hallucination creeps in. You’re absolutely right! Not because the model is careless, but because much of our documentation is structured for narrative flow, not retrieval. It was always fragile, humans were just good at compensating.

Writing for AI agents accidentally makes documentation more accessible. A screen reader user navigating by headings needs the same explicitness an AI agent needs. A new team member needs definitions that don’t assume prior knowledge. A developer working in a second language needs sentences that say exactly what they mean. Explicitness helps anyone who can’t rely on context to fill gaps.

Look at well-documented APIs. The ones that specify exactly what parameters do, what they return, what breaks. They’re used more, trusted more, cause fewer support tickets. Explicitness scales."

https://gerireid.com/blog/ai-is-accidently-making-documentation-accessible/

#TechnicalWriting #Acessibility #TechnicalCommunication #AI #SoftwareDocumentation #AIAgents #APIDocumentation #Markdown

"A prominent cancer scientist is uprooting his Harvard University lab of two decades and moving it to Texas. A laid-off expert on aging abandoned academia for a more secure municipal research job in New York City. And a women’s health researcher, exhausted by the churn of immigration policies, made the wrenching decision to start over in Canada.

Their departures illustrate a sobering new reality: The Trump administration’s research funding cuts, abrupt policy shifts, and crackdown on immigration are driving a brain drain that threatens Massachusetts’ standing as a global hub of biomedical research, its economy – and the fight against major diseases such as childhood cancers, Alzheimer’s, and sickle cell.

To better understand the impact of the cuts, the Globe partnered with MassINC Polling Group. Together they reached out to nearly 4,000 scientists who received funding from the National Institutes of Health. Ultimately 367 completed the survey, which MassINC’s president, Steve Koczela, described as a solid response rate.

The results were stark: Over two-thirds said they recommend their students consider careers outside academia. The majority had delayed hiring in their labs, and one-third had laid off workers. More than one in six said they have lost researchers to institutions in other countries since Trump took office. Sixty-eight percent said funding cuts and federal policy changes had moderately or significantly reduced the scope of their work."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/metro/massachusetts-nih-cuts-biotech-scientists/

#USA #Boston #BioTech #Trump #Austerity #AntiScience

"Now that I have college-age kids myself, I’m once again seeing these dynamics firsthand. Corporations recruit students as early as freshman year, offering high-paying summer internships that are hard to resist. Preprofessional programs—such as Harvard’s Undergraduate Consulting Group, Princeton’s Tiger Capital Management, and the Blue Chips at the University of Chicago—seek out students, some even before college, and socialize them into these tracks as soon as they set foot on campus. Other organizations don’t have the resources to compete, making them less visible to students and less prestigious.

Despite their lofty mission statements about developing civic leaders, few schools push back against this corporate career funnel. Most colleges profess to be neutral when it comes to first jobs—but they benefit from the funding streams provided by prospective employers, who pay colleges thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases upwards of $20,000, to promote themselves to students through career-services offices.

Many students today are, understandably, anxious about the rise of AI and its effects on entry-level roles. But this development could also give us an opportunity to change the norms around first-job choices. Many corporations will soon need fewer staffers straight out of college to do routine work, but they will still need people among their senior ranks with strong leadership qualities.

Companies will therefore have every incentive to push back their recruiting timelines and encourage young people to acquire crucial human skills first—the kinds of skills that can best be developed by working in communities to tackle social problems. And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/first-jobs-graduates-predict-future/685892/

#FirstJobs #Schools #HigherEd #JobMarket #WageSlavery

RT @rickperlstein
The New York Times, so far, finding it Not Fit To Print, read up on a general strike involving three hundred million people.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/02/12/300-million-on-the-streets-in-a-historic-national-strike-in-india/

"O ponto mais importante do Super Bowl de 2026 não foi só o cantor Bad Bunny. Foi o fato de o evento ter sido tomado por anúncios das empresas de inteligência artificial. Só lembrando, esses espaços publicitários estão entre os mais caros do mundo.

Em 2026 houve anúncios de Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon (focando na Alexa+), Google Gemini e de nomes menos conhecidos como a Base44, a empresa Artlist (que usou IA para criar seu próprio comercial) ou a startup Genspark.

Isso é um mau sinal. Nas duas últimas vezes em que a final do futebol americano foi dominada por anúncios de empresas de tecnologia, aquele foi também o ano de implosão de bolhas especulativas no setor.

No Super Bowl, Anthropic usou o comercial para ironizar decisão da OpenAI de incluir publicidade na plataforma - Reprodução
Por exemplo, o ano de 2022 foi chamado de o Super Bowl das criptomoedas. As empresas de cripto viviam um momento de exuberância. Exibiram comerciais no evento a Crypto.com, a Coinbase, eToro e a FTX. Note que o Super Bowl foi realizado dia 13 de fevereiro daquele ano.

Três meses depois, as criptomoedas desabaram. Em maio de 2022, a stablecoin chamada LUNA implodiu, gerando prejuízos bilionários. Em novembro foi a vez da FTX. Não só a empresa capotou brutalmente, como pouco depois seu fundador acabou sendo preso por fraude financeira.
(...)
Anúncios extravagantes geram desconfiança. Passam a impressão de que as empresas estão desesperadas por aumentar o número de usuários para amortizar o monumental investimento feito até agora no setor e na sua infraestrutura. Esse padrão não está acontecendo só nos EUA, mas na China também."

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/ronaldolemos/2026/02/empresas-de-ia-dominaram-o-super-bowl-mau-sinal.shtml

#IA #BigTech #Superbowl

RT @TheHackersNews
🚨 Google patched Chrome zero-day CVE-2026-2441, a CVSS 8.8 bug already exploited in attacks.

The CSS use-after-free flaw allows sandboxed remote code execution via malicious pages.

🔗 Read → https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/new-chrome-zero-day-cve-2026-2441-under.html

First active Chrome zero-day fixed this year. Update now.

"Four years ago, as Yan Junjie pitched his vision for artificial intelligence startup MiniMax Group Inc. to China’s largest internet companies and tech investors, the response was unanimous — and brutal.

“They genuinely believed we were frauds,” Yan recalls of the response to his idea: a company built entirely around multi-modal AI, meaning it’s capable of processing text, images, audio and video together.

Today, Shanghai-based MiniMax is a multibillion-dollar firm, making him a billionaire at 36. Its models — which he obsessively benchmarks against OpenAI — are helping fuel a new wave of technological nationalism. Along with peers such as DeepSeek’s millennial quant prodigy Liang Wenfeng and Unitree Robotics’ Wang Xingxing, Yan belongs to a generation of Chinese entrepreneurs challenging US dominance in AI.

And the group is growing in size as a flurry of Chinese AI firms go public, amongst them MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai Co.’s Chen Weiliang and Moore Threads Technology Co.’s Zhang Jianzhong.

These new tycoons have amassed a collective $100.5 billion, rivaling Bill Gates's $105 billion net worth. While significant, this remains well below the $153 billion fortune of Jensen Huang, one of the primary beneficiaries of the AI hardware boom in the US.
Their rise during an escalating tech and geopolitical rift between the world’s superpowers underscores how wealth creation in China is now entwined with the state’s push for technological independence.

That shift has ushered in a new kind of tech elite in China. The era of the rock-star CEOs — exemplified by Jack Ma’s extroverted performance at an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s anniversary party in 2017 — has given way to a generation of quiet geeks."

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-china-ai-billionaires/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Billionaires #MiniMax #MetaX #China

"In simpler terms:

- AI startups are all unprofitable, and do not appear to have a path to sustainability.

- AI data centers are being built in anticipation of demand that doesn’t exist, and will only exist if AI startups — which are all unprofitable — can afford to pay them.

- Oracle, which has committed to building 4.5GW of data centers, is burning cash every day that OpenAI takes to set up its GPUs, and when it starts making money, it does so from a starting position of billions and billions of dollars in debt.

- Margins are low throughout the entire stack of AI data center operators — from landlords like Applied Digital to compute providers like CoreWeave — thanks to the billions in debt necessary to fund both construction and IT hardware to make them run, putting both parties in a hole that can only be filled with revenues that come from either hyperscalers or AI startups.

- In a very real sense, the AI compute industry is dependent on AI “working out,” because if it doesn’t, every single one of these data centers will become a burning hole in the ground.

I will admit I’m quite disappointed that the media at large has mostly ignored this story. Limp, cautious “are we in an AI bubble?” conversations are insufficient to deal with the potential for collapse we’re facing.

Today, I’m going to dig into the reality of the costs of AI, and explain in gruesome detail exactly how easily these data centers can rapidly approach insolvency in the event that their tenants fail to pay."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/data-center-crisis/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #OpenAI #Anthropic

RT @HedgieMarkets
🦔 Notepad now requires internet connectivity to keep Copilot integration functional. That connectivity enabled a remote code execution vulnerability with a severity rating of 8.8 out of 10.
An attacker can create a malicious Markdown file with specially crafted links. If you open it in Notepad and click a link, a script can download and execute code with your full permissions.

My Take
For 40 years Notepad was the simplest tool on Windows. No internet connection. No fancy features. No way for hackers to get in. People used it specifically because it was basic, just a place to write text without any complexity getting in the way.
Then Microsoft decided it needed AI. To make Copilot work, Notepad now connects to the internet. That connection opened a door that hackers can walk through. If you open the wrong file and click the wrong link, someone can take control of your computer.

This is what happens when you add features nobody asked for to products that worked fine without them. Microsoft fired their testing teams years ago, started using AI to write their code, and decided every single application needs Copilot whether users want it or not. Now a text editor, the most basic program imaginable, has the kind of security hole you'd expect in complex software. They took something simple and reliable and made it complicated and vulnerable. I'm not sure that's progress.

Hedgie🤗

https://x.com/HedgieMarkets/status/2021790860774445487

Democracy? What Democracy? It's all about the old mighty cold dollar... -> "When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking. The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages. Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content. While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls. Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems. https://theconversation.com/news-sites-are-locking-out-the-internet-archive-to-stop-ai-crawling-is-the-open-web-closing-274968 #OpenWeb #Media #InternetArchive #News #Newspapers #Journalism

"What we are witnessing in America is technofascism. This is fascism partnered with advanced surveillance technologies. And this is what we see playing out in Minneapolis in real time, and with one company playing a pre-eminent role: Palantir. It’s not just Palantir. We’ve seen other data-harvesting monopolies and Silicon Valley companies paying homage to Trump: Meta and Google and OpenAI and Oracle and Amazon and Nvidia, many of which have financial and other links to Thiel. Palantir is the very tip of this extremely poisonous spear. What is happening in Minneapolis is a trial balloon. It’s where Trump is testing the limits of his power. That includes his ability to suppress dissent, to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, to break people’s will. And surveillance is at the heart of this. It’s no coincidence that ICE officers wear masks. For them, privacy is impunity. That’s what the killing of Alex Pretti showed last week: that no one would be held to account. But for everyone else, there was another lesson: that there is nowhere to hide. Personal data is the key to Trump’s political project. It’s an essential part of ICE’s work, the foundation for what is now under construction, and Minneapolis is where you can see it being built: an authoritarian surveillance state." https://www.thenerve.news/p/technofascism-us-america-fascism-trump-palantir-peter-thiel-uk-nigel-farage-reform #USA #Trump #Palantir #TechnoFascism #Fascism #UK #Reform #ICE #Surveillance #PoliceState

"Amid tensions over President Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota and beyond, federal agents were told this week that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times. The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person. The shift comes as the administration has deployed thousands of masked immigration agents into cities nationwide. A week before the memo, it came to light that Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of the agency, had issued guidance in May saying agents could enter homes with only an administrative warrant, not a judicial one. And the day before the memo, Mr. Trump said he would “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis, after agents fatally shot two people in the crackdown there. The memo, addressed to all ICE personnel and signed on Wednesday by Mr. Lyons, centers on a federal law that empowers agents to make warrantless arrests of people they believe are undocumented immigrants, if they are “likely to escape” before an arrest warrant can be obtained." https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/politics/ice-expands-power-agents-warrants.html #USA #Trump #Immigration #ICE #Militias #Paramilitary #PoliceState