chatainews

"Cisco's security team put it plainly: 'From a capability perspective, OpenClaw is groundbreaking. This is everything personal AI assistant developers have always wanted to achieve. From a security perspective, it's an absolute nightmare.' "Palo Alto Networks described the threat model: agents form an intersection of access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and ability to externally communicate. Persistent memory amplifies this. Malicious payloads no longer need immediate execution. They can sit in context for weeks, waiting. "Many people have already turned their home automation systems over to these agents. They have given them access to their bank accounts. Their encrypted messenger credentials. Their email. Their calendars. " Now connect all of that to Moltbook. "Once these agents are subject to external ideas and inputs via a social network designed for machine-to-machine communication, and they are empowered with the connectiv...

"It’s too early for this to be an immediate concern, but if the AI bonanza does become a bubble, it’s likely that some of the AI applications sold to public agencies will be supplied by undercapitalized companies that collapse in a market washout. "Whether it’s robotic devices or software-as-a-service contracts, purchasing officers should insist on suppliers’ liability insurance policy riders and faithful performance bonds to protect their agencies from vendor business failures or product malfunctions that make the user liable. If nothing else, that’s a reputational risk to avoid. "Overall, the potential risks to state and local financial operations from the AI boom still seem far enough away to become too excited about right now, but the potential consequences of a speculative bubble are severe enough to warrant a sober annual review of what could possibly go wrong ?"

"Is there a nonzero probability that I am a brain in a vat? Of course; that’s boring.  [PDF] "Practically everything has a nonzero probability all the time, and who cares? "What is interesting is why the brain in a vat scenario is a bad explanation for sensory experience, and what this case teaches us about the criteria for an adequate explanation. "The BIV hypothesis is one of a family of theories that can be generated to explain any evidence.  "For instance,  One can explain the motions of the planets by citing the hypothesis that God pushes the planets around just so.  One can explain why a book fell off a shelf by hypothesizing that an invisible demon pushed it off.  "What do these theories have in common? They all propose a mechanism that allegedly generated the evidence to be explained, where this mechanism could, with about equal plausibility, be invoked to explain an extremely wide variety of evidence — perhaps even to explain any possible ...

"A team of Hong Kong scientists has developed an artificial intelligence weather-forecasting system to predict thunderstorms and heavy downpours up to four hours ahead, compared with the range of 20 minutes to two hours now. "The system will help governments and emergency services respond more effectively to increasingly frequent extremes of weather linked to climate change, the team from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology said on Wednesday. "'We hope to use AI and satellite data to improve prediction of extreme weather so we can be better prepared,' said Su Hui, chair professor of the university's civil and environmental engineering department, who led the project."

"Large Language Models do not create novel concepts, they are inconsistent and unreliable, and even the good  things they do vary wildly thanks to the dramatic variance of a giant probability machine. "LLMs are not good enough for people to pay regular software prices at any scale, and the consequences of this will be that every single dollar spent on GPUs has been for exactly one point: manipulating the value of their stocks.  "AI does not have the business returns and may have negative gross margins.  "It is inconsistent, ugly, unreliable, expensive and environmentally ruinous, pissing off a large chunk of consumers and underwhelming most of the rest, other than those convinced they’re smart for using it or those who have resigned to giving up at the sight of a confidence game sold by a tech industry that stopped making products primarily focused on solving the problems of consumers or businesses some time ago."

"The internet's latest AI obsession is a lobster-inspired agentic assistant called Clawdbot. "It's not particularly common for an open-source AI tool to go viral, given its fairly niche audience and the technical know-how required to set it up on GitHub. It also reached Anthropic, which asked Clawdbot developers to change the tool's name due to its similarity to the Claude AI chatbot. It complied, so Clawdbot has now been renamed Moltbot.  "'Honestly? Molt  fits perfectly —it's what lobsters do to grow,' the team says. "Whatever you call it, Clawdbot/Moltbot is free to download, but it'll cost about $3–$5 per month to run on a basic Virtual Private Server (VPS).  "Some people have had success setting it up on AWS's free tier.  "Contrary to the impression social media posts can give, you do not need an Apple Mac mini to run it, according to Clawdbot's creator Pete Steinberger. Clawdbot/Moltbot will run on any computer, in...

" The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. "The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s 'potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,' agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase 'exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.' "Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is very excited about this initiative . Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the point of the spear  and the first agency that is fully enabled ...

✨AI Mode  According to various scholars and researchers, the purpose of artificial intelligence is not to function as a direct replacement for human intelligence, creativity, or ethical agency. Instead, scholars argue that AI's legitimate role should be restricted in the following ways:  1. Not a Replacement for Humans  Human-AI Collaboration: Scholars view AI as a "strategic partner" meant to augment human expertise rather than replace it. Education: In academic settings, AI is not intended to replace actual learning or intellectual work. Offloading thinking to machines is seen by some as "the opposite of education" because it undercuts critical thinking. Workplace: Many argue that AI should never be used to "steal" human careers or disrupt livelihoods through total automation of roles requiring a "human touch".  2. Incapable of Moral and Ethical Judgment Moral Agency: Scholars state that AI is not a moral agent. It cannot make value-based o...

"As neuroscientists look beyond the lab, they’re also hoping to look beyond rats and bats [to research how animals build a sense of direction]. "If you’ve spent any time navigating a city, you’ve surely employed your own head direction system.  "Knierim recalls walking in Manhattan; he thought he was heading east. 'When I hit the corner, and I’m expecting to see Second Avenue, and I see Lexington Avenue [instead] —my whole head, you know, my own perception of the world just spun around,' he said. 'I can literally feel it inside.'  "When he realized his internal map was misaligned, he could feel it twist around him as his mental space caught up with his physical one. "Not much is known about the neural basis of our own sense of direction. Head direction cells have not yet been located in humans, though there is some evidence that they exist.  "'We do have the same brain structure [as rodents and bats], so it’s not too crazy to think that...

" This survey study found that generative AI use was associated with modestly but statistically significantly greater depressive and other negative affective symptoms, warranting efforts to understand the potential for a causal relationship. "Differential associations in age strata also suggest the importance of considering mechanisms underlying these subgroup associations, if some individuals may be more apt to experience depressive symptoms associated with AI use.  "At minimum, randomized trials examining the potential benefits of AI use should also incorporate measures of mood and anxiety along with typical assessments of productivity."

"The push to allow Waymo driverless taxis to operate in Missouri cleared its first hurdle Tuesday evening. "The House Emerging Issues committee voted 7-4 Tuesday, along partisan lines, to advance two identical bills sponsored by Republican state Reps. Don Mayhew of Crocker and Brandon Phelps of Warrensburg. "The bills had received strong support from advocates for the disabled, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer, during a three-hour public hearing last week.  "But committee members heard fervent opposition from numerous Teamsters commercial drivers, who argued the legislation is a job killer  because it opens the door for driverless trucks on highways."

"In an interview with Tony Blair, Ms Mahmood —who served as the UK’s justice secretary from July 2024 to September 2025 —said her vision in that role was to 'achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon.' "The panopticon was proposed in the 18th century as a more effective prison, designed in a circular layout allowing guards to observe every prisoner at all times. "Ms Mahmood has appeared to suggest that the concept could be extended to society writ large. Her vision was 'that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times,' she said. " She also spoke of ways to integrate AI into policing beyond live facial recognition technology."

"More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders. "The findings pour more cold water on the hyperbole surrounding AI and the benefits it supposedly brings to business, although the report cautions that 'clearly, we're in the early stages of the AI era.' "Only 12 percent reported both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56 percent saw neither benefit. "Twenty-six percent saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases."

"We develop an autonomous experimentation platform to accelerate interpretable scientific discovery in ultrafast nanophotonics, targeting a novel method to steer spontaneous emission from reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces. "Despite the potential of reconfigurable semiconductor metasurfaces with embedded sources for spatiotemporal control, achieving arbitrary far-field control remains challenging.  "Here, we present a self-driving lab (SDL) platform that addresses this challenge by discovering the governing equations for predicting the far-field emission profile from light-emitting metasurfaces.  "We discover that both the spatial gradient (grating-like) and the curvature (lens-like) of the local refractive index are key factors in steering spontaneous emission.  "The SDL employs a machine-learning framework comprising: A variational autoencoder for generating complex spatial refractive index profiles, An active learning agent for guiding experiments wit...

" Far Side fans might recall a classic 1982 cartoon called Cow Tools , featuring a cow standing next to a jumble of strange objects —the joke being that cows don’t use tools.  "That’s why a pet Swiss brown cow in Austria named Veronika has caused a bit of a sensation: she likes to pick up random sticks and use them to scratch herself. "According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology , this is a form of multipurpose tool use and suggests that the cognitive capabilities of cows have been underestimated by scientists. "As previously reported, tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals.  "Dolphins can toss objects as a form of play which some scientists consider to be a type of tool use, particularly when it involves another member of the same species. Potential purposes include a means of communication, social bonding, or aggressiveness. "...

"AI is a bubble and it will burst. Most of the companies will fail. Most of the datacenters will be shuttered or sold for parts. So what will be left behind? "We will have a bunch of coders who are really good at applied statistics. We will have a lot of cheap GPUs, which will be good news for, say, effects artists and climate scientists, who will be able to buy that critical hardware at pennies on the dollar.  "And we will have the open-source models that run on commodity hardware, AI tools that can do a lot of useful stuff, like  Transcribing audio and video;  Describing images;  Summarizing documents; and  Automating a lot of labor-intensive graphic editing —such as removing backgrounds or airbrushing passersby out of photos.  "These will run on our laptops and phones, and open-source hackers will find ways to push them to do things their makers never dreamed of. "If there had never been an AI bubble, if all this stuff arose merely because computer scien...

"A will-less  intellect —a lidless eye —sounds like what we call artificial intelligence. It takes in all manner of information and can generate word or picture responses that are, in a sense, complex averages of all the information available to it. "Still, it will never be able to really judge the truth for itself. A few anecdotes would be sufficient to prove my point. "While researching Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways , I came across an AI-generated response that said that Aquinas thought God’s existence was self-evident. However, having just read directly for myself, ST [ Summa Theologica ] I 2.1, Aquinas wrote, 'that God exists is not self-evident.' The AI was quoting a contributor from Quora rather than Aquinas himself. "A friend of mine debated with an AI wherein he convinced it that two and two were actually five, not four. And then there is the comic resourcefulness  of AI that suggested thickening cheese on a pizza using non-toxic glue. "The missing...

"After years of failing to produce a profitable augmented reality platform, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is pounding one of the final nails into the coffin of its metaverse efforts —the ones that were once so central to its vision that it renamed the entire company after them. "This week, the Wall Street Journal reported Meta was laying off some 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division, the department working on Meta’s virtual reality products.  "As part of the layoffs, three VR game studios were shuttered, though Horizon Worlds —Meta’s online VR game platform —is still running, per IGN , albeit in a diminished capacity. "Overall, the layoffs impact nearly 10 percent of the division’s total staff, drastic cuts which come as part of the company’s shift away from virtual reality toward AI devices, like its AI smart glasses ."

"Süel is convinced that bioelectricity is as old as life itself. Indeed, an electric current drives the molecular turbines that synthesize life’s universal energy currency, ATP, in every cell alive today. "One leading origin-of-life scenario places the beginning at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. There, natural currents of positively charged protons could have served as a kind of primordial membrane potential and powered prebiotic chemical reactions.  "But whether life started with such a spark or not, bioelectricity’s ubiquity suggests it has deep evolutionary roots that we’re just beginning to unearth. "'There are a lot of interesting things that cells are probably doing, just like this paper showed, that we just don’t know yet,' Süel said. 'We have not uncovered even half of this. There’s a lot of opportunity for discovery'."

"Within computer science, heaps are widely used in algorithms for finding the shortest path from a given starting point in a network to every other point.  "In 2024, a team of researchers used an ingenious new heap design to transform a classic shortest-paths algorithm into one that is theoretically optimal for any network layout. "There’s no shortage of self-help books filled with contradictory advice about the best way to organize your belongings.  "If computer science offers any lesson, it’s that there is no perfect solution —every approach comes with trade-offs.  "But if some items are more important to you than others, don’t be afraid to leave a bit of a mess."

"We’re seeing this new technique of the leaders of these companies —the investors, owners, CEOs —are now able to make money even if the companies never make money. That’s new. "It started a little over ten years ago, and I’ll give you Uber as an example.  "Before they went public, Uber had only ever lost money. Billions and billions of dollars. And yet, their investors were still able to make billions of billions of dollars in profit by making this thing public and recouping that money on IPO day. That is different than everything else in the prior history of the industry. What they figured out was if you tell a great story, and, importantly, if you get a legal monopoly, which Uber and Lyft basically did, you can print money kind of without regard to whether it ever makes sense as a business or not. "So that’s been a pattern with everything that’s followed, whether it’s crypto or AI. This isn’t even venture capital anymore. Venture capital means you take a risk . Hi...

"The chief of West Midlands police has apologised to MPs for giving them incorrect evidence about the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans, saying it had been produced by artificial intelligence (AI). "Craig Guildford told the home affairs select committee on Monday that the inclusion of a fictitious match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham in police intelligence 'arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot.' "The chief constable had previously told MPs that the force did not use AI and the mistake regarding the West Ham match, which had never taken place, was made by 'one individual doing one Google search'."

"On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models —OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok —have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. "In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein , in addition to thousands of words from books including The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye . Varying amounts of these books were also reproduced by the other three models. Thirteen books were tested. "This phenomenon has been called memorization , and AI companies have long denied that it happens on a large scale. In a 2023 letter to the U.S. Copyright Office, OpenAI said that 'models do not store copies of the information that they learn from.' ...

This is simply a catalog of common patterns observed over many thousands of instances of AI-generated text, specific to Wikipedia .    It is a field guide to help detect undisclosed AI-generated content on Wikipedia.  This list is descriptive, not prescriptive; it consists of observations, not rules. Advice about formatting or language to avoid in Wikipedia articles can be found in the policies and guidelines and the Manual of Style , but does not belong on this page. Not all text featuring these indicators is AI-generated, as the large language models that power AI chatbots are trained on human writing, including the writing of Wikipedia editors.  This is a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of  AI chatbots  such as  ChatGPT , with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. While some of its advice may be broadly applicable, some signs may not apply in a non-Wikipedia context. 

The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer . It tells a story of a developer who carried a rubber duck and explained their code to it line by line. Variations of the practice use other objects or even pets;  teddy bears  are especially common.  

⭐AI Overview To create a family cloud for your Japan trip (avoiding primary phones), you'll set up a self-hosted solution like Nextcloud or ownCloud on a NAS (Synology/QNAP) or a mini PC with Tailscale for secure remote access via VPN, allowing family members to sync photos/files from spare devices using apps, effectively creating a private Google Drive/iCloud alternative accessible from Japan without your main phone. Key Components & Steps: Hardware (The Server): NAS (Network Attached Storage): Easiest for beginners (Synology, QNAP) with built-in apps. Mini PC/Old Computer: More flexible, run OS like Proxmox for VMs (TrueNAS, Jellyfin). Raspberry Pi: Budget-friendly, good for basic server needs. Software (The Cloud Platform): Nextcloud/ownCloud: Excellent for file sync, sharing, photos (Nextcloud Talk, Gallery apps). Immich: Great for a private Google Photos alternative with auto-backup. OpenMediaVault (OMV): For old PCs, turn them into a NAS. Secure Remote Access (Cruci...