canopic jug writes:The Norwegian Consumer Council has published a new report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, about countering big tech's growing abuse of its increasingly concentrated power. The 100-page PDF is accompanied by two cover letters, one in English to various EU/EEA/UK and US institutions, and one in Norwegian to Norwegian authorities. The report starts with the problem of platform decay now known colloquially as enshittification. One change is the demand for action to be taken proactively:
MotorTrend reports https://www.motortrend.com/news/kia-plant-solar-power-hail-protection that the Kia assembly plant in Georgia suffered very expensive hail damage to new cars waiting to be shipped, back in a storm in 2023. The fix is a massive raised solar array of 3.2 million square feet (300,000 meters^2) over the car park/storage area.
Trump Bans Anthropic AI From Federal Agencies After Firm Refuses to Unlock CapabilitiesArthur T Knackerbracket writes:Anthropic cites risks of autonomous military applications, mass domestic surveillance:
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications:
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/block-lays-off-40-of-workforce-as-it-goes-all-in-on-ai-tools/c16fbef0848a80413fcac6e5598b4dc9
fliptop writes:OpenAI has closed a new funding round that could total $110 billion, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion pre-money and potentially putting it on course for an IPO in the second half of the year:
fliptop writes:A single attacker used Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT to compromise nine Mexican government agencies, stealing 195 million taxpayer records and voter data:
canopic jug writes:Blogger Ben Werdmuller has discussed an article in Nature about the political impact of the algorithm(s) used by X (formerly known as Twitter). The gist is that the use of the algorithms against X's users tends to shift about 5% of them in a specific direction. That's more than enough to tip an election one way or another especially since the damage seems persistent and lasts even after exposure ceases.
jelizondo writes:NPR has a nice summary of an interview with Michael Pollan about AI and consciousness, but it kind of goes beyond that.[Professor Pollan is the author of more than an dozen books, most notably "This is your mind on plants" about using psychedelics .]
Dan Anderson writes:Two weeks ago, I set up an AI agent on a Raspberry Pi.A week later, my agent-Figaro-taught itself to play NetHack... and then things got weird (in the best way).Highlights so far:
HeadlineEditor writes:Forget about Discord - this proposed legislation in Colorado requires each OS user to have an age associated with it. I wonder if they're worried about children pretending to be adults, or adults pretending to be children.-Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date or age of the user of that device to provide a signal regarding the user's age bracket (age signal) to applications available in a covered application store;
hubie writes:Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars - even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth:
hubie writes:Red Hat's toolkit offers governments and enterprises a way to measure the control they actually have over their data, infrastructure, and operations in this era of geopolitical cloud anxiety:
canopic jug writes:Privacy is prerequisite for free thought, dissent, experimentation, and innovation, which are in turn prerequisites for democracy.At NBTV, Naomi Brockwell has posted four reasons why limits on privacy are absolutely not a price worth paying for mainstream adoption.
hubie writes:Penn Medicine researchers find that earplugs work better in protecting sleep from traffic noise, challenging the widespread use of ambient sound machines and apps marketed as sleep aids:
canopic jug writes:A while back, Freenet Africa had a nice background piece about software luminary and founder of the software freedom movement, Richard Stallman (aka RMS). The article covers his background starting with the GNU project and following through to the current, ongoing fight for digital freedom.