Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

"A month into the war in the Middle East, an unlikely shortage of an irreplaceable gas is looming over the global economy.
Helium is a gas that is odorless, colorless and lighter than air. It is also indispensable to manufacturing the computer chips that power artificial intelligence, an important driver of U.S. markets and economic growth.

A byproduct of natural gas processing, helium is produced mainly in the United States and Qatar. When output in Qatar was halted this month, it cut off roughly a third of the global supply. The outlook worsened last week after Iran struck Qatar’s largest liquefied natural gas facility, damaging helium production lines that could take years to rebuild.

Without helium, leading chip makers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, could struggle to keep production lines running, with cascading effects for semiconductor-powered devices from Apple’s iPhones to Nvidia’s A.I. servers.

Helium may be best known for keeping balloons afloat, but its industrial uses are far more consequential. As the coldest liquid on earth, it cools superconducting magnets in M.R.I. machines. A shortage could ripple far beyond chip making, affecting everything from scientific research to space travel.

Semiconductor companies rely on helium at multiple stages of chip manufacturing. As intricate machines etch tiny circuits onto thin wafers of silicon, helium cools them from below to maintain the right temperature. After the wafers are washed with chemicals, helium is used to flush out toxic residue."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/business/helium-chips-iran-war.html

#Iran #USA #Trump #Helium #Chips #AI #MiddleEast #NaturalGas

"For more than a decade, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report has documented fundamental shifts in how young people (defined in this report as those aged 18–24) interact with and think about news during a period of significant technological, media, and political transformation. As ‘social natives’, this demographic is moving away from traditional news media like television, print, and even news websites, gravitating instead towards a social-first and audiovisual-heavy media diet, where news is one type of content consumed among many.

While much has been said about the perceived lack of news engagement among younger people, our research also documents a greater sense of alienation among this segment of the public, some of whom find traditional news irrelevant, difficult to understand, or unfairly biased against their demographic. Mismatches between journalistic output and the expectations of young audiences highlight the need for newsrooms to examine both the question of how to reach young people where they are and, equally important, how to do so with news they find relevant, engaging, and ultimately worth their attention. Meeting the needs of this segment is crucial, not just for the current stability of the journalism industry, but also for the future of democratic societies as young individuals transition through adulthood (Røsok-Dahl and Ihlebæk 2024).

In this report we bring together evidence from over a decade of Reuters Institute research to shed light on young audiences today. Understanding generational shifts is vital for the financial sustainability of the news industry, which depends on a pipeline of younger consumers who will keep coming back to news. It also matters for the democratic health of our societies, which requires individual citizens, including young people, to be informed and collectively share a basic understanding of the world."

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/understanding-young-news-audiences-time-rapid-change

#Media #News #YoungAudiences #Journalism #MediaLiteracy

"Judging by the metrics of conventional conflict, Iran is not faring well against the United States and Israel. Its adversaries are destroying crucial targets in Iran, killing its commanders and degrading its military assets. But these are the wrong measures for assessing Iran’s position in the war. The right measure is not even an assessment of whether Iran is absorbing punishment well—which it is. The question that will matter when the fighting ends is whether Tehran is achieving its strategic objectives. And on that count, Iran is winning.

This outcome is not accidental. Tehran has been preparing for this war for nearly four decades, since the new revolutionary government faced its first major military test in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. And it is now executing a strategy that has managed to neutralize key U.S. and Israeli air defense batteries, severely damage U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf, inflict substantial economic pain, and drive a wedge between the United States and its Gulf allies. The Iranian regime, in other words, is not just surviving the U.S. and Israeli bombardment. The serious economic and political problems it is creating for its adversaries are, on a strategic level, giving Iran the upper hand."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/irans-long-game#

#Iran #USA #Israel #Trump #Militarism #War

"Can I convince AI to write useful content with minimal input from me? No. The input required is substantial; it's just a different kind of input than writing from scratch. Instead of staring at a blank page, I'm interrogating drafts, verifying claims, reframing angles, and restructuring articles. It's editing rather than writing, but it's not less work.

Can it provide a novel editorial take? Sometimes. The models produce serviceable takes that, with significant editorial shaping, become useful articles. But the novel connections, the thematic throughlines, the "this matters because of what we published last week" insights all come from me.

Can it produce accurate articles? Not without heavy verification. Every single article required factual corrections. Some were minor (wrong pipeline phase names, singular vs. plural). Some were serious (fabricated implementation details, wrong OWASP rankings, misleading CVE framing). The pipeline's verification step catches a small number of them. The rest require an editor who reads critically and clicks every link.

Can I edit out the AI writing tics? Mostly. The automated copy-editing pass handles the obvious markers. The subtler ones take manual work, and I'm still learning which tics I'm missing in my own editing passes.

I still think, for my needs, the pipeline is a useful tool for editorial content production. It's just not the "AI writes the blog" story that the stats at the top of this article might suggest. It's more like "AI produces a structured first draft that an experienced editor spends 90 minutes turning into something publishable." Whether that's worth it depends on what you value."

https://dacharycarey.com/2026/03/26/drafting-editorial-content-with-ai/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #TechnicalWriting #Writing #Blogging #Blogs

MUST READ ARTICLE:

"Opinion remains divided on exactly what the second Trump administration represents. Its arbitrary resort to tariffs and flagrant disregard for international norms has prompted many to condemn the supposed sabotage of Pax Americana—what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described as a decisive “rupture” with the post-war multilateral system. Others, citing the administration’s foreign policy on the Middle East and its obedience to financial speculators, see as much continuity as change. Yet regardless of their emphasis, most commentators invoke the standard of a “rules-based international order” against which to measure the current state of global instability and insecurity.

The reality, though, is that such “ruptures” have been a recurrent feature of global governance for decades. If we are to fully understand Trump, and imagine how we might replace the world he symbolizes with a more just and stable one, we must recognize the extent to which the previous period of supposed order has, contra Carney, been a succession of US-led experiments in hegemonic destruction and reinvention. Only then will the contours of a more equitable international settlement begin to reveal themselves."

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/rupture-what-rupture/

#USA #Imperialism #PoliticalEconomy #Hegemony #Neocolonialism #Geopolitics #InternationalLaw

"Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.
(...)
Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.
Amazon said the review of website availability was “part of normal business” and it aims for continual improvement.

“TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store,” the company said.
Separately, the company’s cloud computing arm — Amazon Web Services — has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants, which the company has been actively rolling out to its staff.

AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a cost calculator used by customers in mid-December after engineers allowed the group’s Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, and the AI tool opted to “delete and recreate the environment”, the FT previously reported."

https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de

#Amazon #AI #GenerativeAI #AWS #VibeCoding #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment

"Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.

Obviously, this indictment applies about equally to OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who gladly swooped in and snatched the Pentagon largesse that Amodei will now be denied) and to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis and to xAI’s Elon Musk. All the big AI companies are putting their tools at the disposal of the Pentagon to use as it sees fit.

All of these men, if pressed to justify this, would no doubt recite something about the importance of keeping America secure. Maybe somebody should ask them to name a recent US military intervention that had that effect."

https://www.nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the-immorality-of-openai

#USA #Trump #Pentagon #DoD #Iran #AI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #OpenAI #Google

"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 MIT economist has spent decades studying the origins of economic and political decay, specializing in how institutions foster inclusive growth—or succumb to extractive systems. In the 2012 book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Acemoglu and co-writer James A. Robinson argue that nations proper because of their political institutions. In 2024, Acemoglu won the Nobel Prize in economics, alongside Robinson and Simon Johnson, for demonstrating how political and economic institutions shape prosperity.

Acemoglu argued that while Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are weakening the country’s institutions, the president is not the root cause of the broader structural problems. He warned the country is headed down a grim path and outlined two shifts relative to AI development he sees as critical to avoiding deeper decline: cracking down on economic inequality and tempering job destruction. “If we go down this path of destroying jobs [and] creating more inequality, U.S. democracy is not going to survive,” he told Fortune.

According to Acemoglu, AI-driven job displacement could be catastrophic and further entrench inequality. He notes the U.S. is currently seeing unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, and traditional policy has failed to close the gap. “We may need wealth taxes because anything else we do today is still going to lead to this huge wealth gap that exists in this country.”

https://fortune.com/2026/02/22/who-is-daron-acemoglu-nobel-laureate-ai-job-layoffs-economic-inequality-donald-trump/

#USA #Trump #Democracy #Authoritarianism #Inequality #MassUnemployment #AI

"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

"In his essay “The West’s Last Chance” (January/February 2026), Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, correctly divines the future trajectory of world order. “The global South,” he writes, “will decide whether geopolitics in the next era leans toward cooperation, fragmentation, or domination.” He’s also right in asserting that “this is the last chance for Western countries to convince the rest of the world that they are capable of dialogue rather than monologue.” Yet to have a dialogue, one must listen. The sad truth is that the West does not seem willing to listen to the global South.

The countries of the global South do not all share the dominant Western perspectives about world order. Stubb emphasizes the challenges posed by China and Russia. But many of the 3.3 billion Asians who are not Chinese, along with many of the approximately 1.5 billion people who live in Africa and the over 660 million who live in Latin America, view China and Russia differently. Western policymakers rarely try to understand why. China and Russia may loom menacingly in Western imaginations, but people in the global South do not think of them in that way—nor should they be expected to. Indeed, the rest of the world has had as much, perhaps more, to fear from the West in recent history as it has from the West’s autocratic competitors. To his credit, Stubb urges the governments of Western countries to take the demands and interests of the global South seriously. But engaging with the global South is not just an exercise in listening. It also requires Western governments to reassess their own positions and approaches to a world they have long taken for granted."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/dream-palace-west

#Geopolitics #Multilateralism #GlobalSourth #China #India #Imperialism

""The West insists that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Of course, Ukraine never attacked Russia, but the West’s policies toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union helped precipitate the crisis. Many leading Western thinkers, including the American diplomat George Kennan and the Australian intellectual Owen Harries, had warned decades ago that the eastward expansion of NATO would eventually provoke a Russian backlash. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured a more nuanced view on the war in Ukraine when he said, in May 2022, “Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The United States and the EU are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the United States and Europe should have said: ‘Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ That would have solved the problem.” A 2015 video in which the American political scientist John Mearsheimer explains how the West provoked Russian aggression, drawing from his 2014 essay in these pages, has been watched over 30 million times on YouTube—and widely shared in the global South.

Some Western leaders dismiss these views as amoral and as anathema to the principles that Western democracies seek to uphold in the world. Here, the simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Gaza in 2024 and 2025 undermined Europe’s moral standing. Europeans have rightfully expressed horror over the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine, but EU leaders remained mostly silent as Israel destroyed Gaza. Not only have many more civilians died in Gaza than in Ukraine, but Israeli military actions, according to estimates published in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, may have led to the deaths of five to ten percent of Gaza’s prewar population—a staggering figure, exponentially higher than the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine. No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But this is how European leaders are seen in the global South."

Sinceramente, por mais que tente, não consigo discutir sobre Política com alguém que não é da opinião que TODOS os seres humanos - independentemente da sua raça, origem étnica, religião, género, idade, nível de literacia, etc. - têm direito a usufruir de todo um conjunto de Direitos Básicos, Universais e Invioláveis, extensíveis ao conjunto da Humanidade.

Isso é o legado histórico dos últimos 300 a 200 anos. E alguém que não defende a universalidade dos Direitos Humanos é alguém que pertence verdadeiramente a um universo pré-Abolição da Escravatura, pré-Revolução Francesa e pré-Iluminismo...

"Two New York lawmakers on Friday announced that they are introducing a bill that would impose a three-year moratorium on data center development. The announcement makes New York at least the sixth state to introduce legislation putting a pause on data center development in the past few weeks—one of the latest signs of a growing and bipartisan backlash that is quickly finding traction in statehouses around the country.

Data center moratoriums are “being tested as a model throughout states in this country,” said state senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat, who presented the bill at a press conference Friday with its cosponsor, assemblymember Anna Kelles, also a Democrat. “Democrats and Republicans are moving forward with exactly these kinds of moratoriums. New York should be in the front of the line to get this done.”

The new bill comes as a wave of bipartisan anti-data center sentiment that has swept across the country in recent months. In December, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, became the first national politician to call for a blanket moratorium on data center permitting, saying that a moratorium would “ensure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”"

https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-is-the-latest-state-to-consider-a-data-center-pause/

#AI #DataCenters #Energy #NewYork #USA

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

"AI is expected to reshape society and labor markets, yet experts remain divided on whether AI will primarily displace human labor or generate new employment opportunities. Despite the importance of this debate, little is known about how the public perceives AI’s labor market impact—and how these perceptions affect democratic attitudes and behaviors. Large-scale survey data (N = 37,079; 38 European countries) indicate that the public tends to view AI as labor-replacing rather than labor-creating. Controlling for technology-related, political, and sociodemographic factors, these data further show that perceiving AI as labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) is associated with lower satisfaction with democracy and political engagement with technology. Two preregistered, nationally representative experiments (N = 1,202, United Kingdom; replication study N = 1,200, United States) provide causal evidence for this relationship. Participants exposed to a labor-replacing (vs. labor-creating) AI frame report greater erosion of trust in democracy and lower willingness to politically engage with future AI developments. Together, our findings suggest that perceptions about AI’s labor market consequences—regardless of actual outcomes—may decrease democratic legitimacy and public engagement in shaping the future of AI."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523508123?utm_source=TOC&utm_medium=ealert&TOC_v123_i4=&ref=d12164

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #MassUnemployment #Democracy #PoliticalParticipation

"After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.

This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.

This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.

Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.

“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.

He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).

This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.

Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory."

https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/01/25/trump-bombed-10-countries-trillion-military-budget/

#USA #Trump #Militarism #Warmonger #Imperialism

"Britain’s reliance on Palantir, the controversial US data surveillance firm, is a “gaping national security vulnerability”, MPs and tech experts have said, as a Nerve investigation reveals how deeply embedded the company is in the UK’s critical national infrastructure.

The Nerve’s investigation shows the company, co-founded by one of President Trump’s most loyal allies, Peter Thiel, is enmeshed in Britain’s civil and defence structures to a far greater degree than previously realised. The Nerve has found at least 34 current and past state contracts across at least 10 government departments, local councils and police authorities.

The investigation also reveals previously undisclosed contracts between Palantir and AWE Nuclear Security Technologies, the agency that underpins Britain’s nuclear deterrence programme.

The agency, formerly known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, designs and manufactures the nuclear warheads carried by UK submarines. The Nerve has found £15m worth of contracts for “cloud support” on the Crown Commercial Service dashboard, an agency that works with the Cabinet Office and external suppliers.

These contracts are not on the government’s official contract finder website and the Ministry of Defence refused to either confirm or deny their existence. Palantir did not acknowledge or respond to the Nerve’s inquiries.

The Nerve’s research – shown in two infographics here – shows that Palantir has current and historic deals worth £388m with the MOD across at least a dozen contracts and extensions to contracts, and more than £244m with the NHS (12 contracts/extensions). Government agencies and authorities with smaller contracts include Coventry city council, Leicestershire police, DEFRA and the Homes for Ukraine scheme."

https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-government-contracts-size-nuclear-deterrent-atomic-peter-thiel-louis-mosley

#UK #Palantir #Surveillance #Thiel #NuclearWeapons