Interested in what Hannah Arendt would have thought of our present moment in tech? She told us. New from me - Exploit Machina lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/archives/59/...

in a world of social networks churning with artificial slop trends, we prefer to be your social network trusted for actual slop treatment.

A "'Bespoke AI Family Hub' refrigerator received the overall 'Worst in Show'..'Everything is an order of magnitude more difficult,' [the award presenter] said of the fridge that also uses computer vision to track when food items...and can advertise replacements." apnews.com/article/ces-...

"The study, published in Nature, found that the printed circuit board...accounts for 70% of its carbon footprint... The researchers suggest...chips using common metals like copper instead of rare minerals...and mak[ing] devices modular so the circuit board can be reused"

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

On the Internet, everyone knows you're a dog.

Well of course... Wait til they encounter hooked turns & trams in Marvellous Melbourne

Botsplaining: When you instruct an AI tool to eliminate all sycophancy, but it still defaults to wasting your time with vaguely patronizing replies, e.g. "You have correctly identified a problem!," before it attempts to correct what it did wrong.

I think about this tweet a lot

last night at a bar I learned that they improved pinball by making machines that are entirely computers and they’re much better than what we had before

California's Judicial Council "two weeks ago issued guidelines requiring judges and court staff to either ban generative #AI or adopt a generative AI use policy by Dec. 15": calmatters.org/economy/tech... #ethics #law #courts #tech

FTC vs Amazon opens this week over dark patterns - design tricks that make you accidentally subscribe and struggle to cancel. "The question is when design crosses the line where a reasonable consumer doesn't have a fair shot of understanding what's going on" says @andreamm.bsky.social bit.ly/4mvJV2f

Today is the 30th anniversary of Hackers

LINK ROT: 38% webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available 10 years later. Even among pages that existed in 2021, 22% no longer accessible just two years later. This is often because individual page was deleted or removed on otherwise functional website. Many implications for knowledge 🧪

This week's comic, inspired by a study showing that AI summaries on top of search results are dramatically cutting traffic to websites.

Have you ever said to yourself "Gee, I wonder what it would have sounded like if an early management team at Compaq had performed a version of the 1985 Chicago Bears Superbowl Shuffle?" If so... www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB6M...

There are solid use cases for AI. But they’re not the flashy gen AI apps that get investors excited.

Incredible new privacy risk: Redditor recounts doing a job interview over Zoom with an AI notetaker on the call (Fathom). After the applicant left the call, the interviewers stayed on to discuss/bash her. She then got their post-call remarks in the AI summary. www.reddit.com/r/interviews...

Yet another hallucinated citations case. Sanctions this time include: * lawyer kicked off the case * lawyer must notify all judges in the lawyer's other cases nationwide * lawyer must write to judges who were falsely cited * lawyer reported to state bar www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/... 🤖😵

"Employed at the Post Office Research Station in London, which had the world’s first programmable computer... Tiring of the obstacles women faced, she set up her software company with an initial investment of £6." on.ft.com/3UsOi2J Stephanie Shirley, IT pioneer and philanthropist, 1933-2025

"We found that routine exposure to AI in colonoscopy might reduce the [adenoma detection rate] of standard, non-AI assisted colonoscopy...suggest[ing that] AI exposure might have a negative impact on patient-relevant endpoints in medicine in general." www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Didn’t want to believe this was true. It’s true.

Now do DEFCON 33.

📢 Vacancy alert: @ivir-uva.bsky.social is looking for a postdoc in the Human(e) AI Research Priority Area. Take a look at the details: https://bit.ly/3ItbqLu. Make sure you apply before 20 August! cc @natalihelberger.bsky.social #Vacancies #Jobs

"A Florida jury on Friday found that flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software were partly to blame for a crash that killed a 22-year-old woman..The jury verdict...would require Tesla to pay as much as $243 million" www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/b...

"Discussions about technology for its own sake, without considering its societal consequences, are impossible." CCC, April 6, 2025 www.ccc.de/en/club/unve...

Oh, sweet merciful fire, two notes: (1) Even Latham & Watkins, ya'll. (2) The lawyer defending an AI company for using stolen IP to train their AI/LLM used the company's AI/LLM to cite check her brief, which hallucinated results. fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldoc...

"FBI warned on Thursday that a malicious messaging campaign has been targeting government officials and their acquaintances by sending voice messages generated with artificial intelligence" thehill.com/regulation/n...

"After years of depicting Klarna as an AI-first company, the fintech’s CEO reversed himself, telling Bloomberg the company was once again recruiting humans after the AI approach led to 'lower quality.'" fortune.com/2025/05/09/k...

"An email notification system used by U.S. federal and state government departments to alert residents to important information, has been used to send scam emails...Indiana said a contractor’s account was hacked and used to send the scam messages." techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/g...

Movie you’ve watched more than six times using gifs. (“Hard mode” no Star Wars, Star Trek, or LOTR)

I do wish it was better understood by now—especially by folks in the media—that these "warnings" from large AI corporations in fact function as "advertisements" www.axios.com/2025/04/22/a...

"A test of 22 general-purpose AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, x.AI, Meta, Google and other leading players in artificial intelligence found that all scored less than 50 percent accuracy, on average, for simple tasks required of entry-level financial analysts" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

An astronomy professor colleague of mine once relayed trying to explain to his students why it was important that they actually write their class reports themselves. “The point is not to teach ME about neutron stars,” he said.

Legal research is hard, kids.

Something very Battlestar Galactica about this headline.

In 2025 top 3 uses of GenAI are: therapy/companionship, organising life, and finding purpose. I think something has gone pretty badly wrong here. hbr.org/2025/04/how-...

"The AI industry is moving gradually toward “omni” models, if you will — models that can understand and synthesize many forms of media. " techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/d...

"Albert Saniger allegedly defrauded investors with fabrications of his company's purported artificial intelligence capabilities while covertly employing personnel to satisfy the illusion of technological automation." www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr...

This is an extraordinary story/admission „The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan“ www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

"Following a 2018 corporate realignment...Lu began sabotaging his employer’s systems...The jury convicted Lu of causing intentional damage to protected computers, for which he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison." www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas...

The FTC says Americans reported losses of over $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024 www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

Privacy isn’t about hiding—it’s about trust and control over our own information. In her #SXSW 2025 Keynote, Signal President, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social breaks down why our privacy matters.

Engraving on the exterior of the United States Department of Justice headquarters.

At Cooper-Hewitt.

“[T]he silverback gorilla of nerds.” 😂🤣 This is an older story, but I think it's a good moment to remind ourselves that a single person can make a huge difference in stopping an attack. www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/t...

An excellent documentary about what life was like at the turn of the century when inadequate federal government infrastructures existed. Worth watching! www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjpY...