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

"Given these and many similar observations in the last several months, I’ve realized many of us working on AI in the classroom have made a collective mistake, believing that lazy and engaged uses lie on a spectrum, and that moving our students toward engaged uses would also move them away from the lazy ones.

Faculty and students have been telling me that this is not true, or at least not true enough. Instead of a spectrum, uses of AI are independent options. A student can take an engaged approach to one assignment, a lazy approach on another, and a mix of engaged and lazy on a third. Good uses of AI do not automatically dissuade students from also adopting bad ones; an instructor can introduce AI for essay feedback or test prep without that stopping their student from also using it to write most of their assignments.

Our problem is that we have two problems. One is figuring out how to encourage our students to adopt creative and helpful uses of AI. The other is figuring out how to discourage them from adopting lazy and harmful uses. Those are both important, but the second one is harder."

"I am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress.

Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had AI-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current AI would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their “learning styles.” A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” And another, when asked about their largely AI-written work, replied, “Everyone is doing it.” Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.

We are also hearing a growing sense of sadness from our students about AI use. One of my colleagues reports students being “deeply conflicted” about AI use, originally adopting it as an aid to studying but persisting with a mix of justification and unease."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-ai-enhancing-education-or-replacing-it

#AI #GenerativeAI #Universities #HigherEd #Education #Writing

"Bloomberg News found that about two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places already gripped by high levels of water stress. While these facilities are popping up all over the country, five states alone account for 72% of the new centers in high-stress areas.

Tech giants are racing to expand with new — and larger — data centers to support AI, consuming more resources, including water. That only adds to concerns that communities facing water shortages will have to compete with data center operators to access clean water.

The problem has been years in the making. Some tech companies are trying to find ways to address it, without creating other environmental drawbacks. Meanwhile, the proportion of data centers in water-stressed regions is at a record high.

Even before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, communities complained about data centers guzzling up millions of gallons of water every day from cities that didn’t have all that much to spare. The problem has only deepened in the years since ChatGPT kicked off an AI frenzy."

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Water #WaterScarcity #BigTech #Drought

RT @RnaudBertrand
This is a terrifying phenomenon that should be spoken about much more: insects are quite literally disappearing.

The Bugs Matter citizen science survey (https://buglife.org.uk/news/bugs-matter-survey-shows-ongoing-decline-in-uk-flying-insects/), which lets 1000s of people record insect splats on their vehicle number plates after journeys, reports that the number of insects recorded in the UK between 2021 and 2024 fell by an astounding 63%.

Anyone who's been driving a car for a long time has witnessed the phenomenon.

When I was a kid over 30 years ago, during even short journeys in the French countryside our car's windshield would be absolutely littered with insects splats.

Last year, I drove from Paris to the South of France and my windshield was pristine when I arrived: not a single insect.

https://www.buglife.org.uk/news/bugs-matter-survey-shows-ongoing-decline-in-uk-flying-insects/

"The promise of realtime deepfakes for fraudsters is that they can use the tech to engage with a victim in the moment. Rather than some scripted video which may or may not be tailored to the victim, realtime deepfakes allow a scammer to talk directly to their mark and improvise on video calls or livestreams. They can appear just as human as the person they are impersonating, potentially fooling not only people but also the automated systems that require someone to prove their identity to open an account with a financial institution, for example.

For months 404 Media has monitored the spread of deepfake technology throughout fraud-focused Telegram channels. For much of that time, the results were not impressive. Some involved using AI to animate a photo in an attempt to bypass cryptocurrency exchanges’ identity verification processes and the videos were stilted and unnatural. Others looked more realistic, but it was unclear whether the advertisements were scams—fraudsters on Telegram asked for hundreds of dollars for access to their tool that allegedly bypassed know-your-customer (KYC) verification checks. Some fraudsters also advertised access to tools that let a phone user replace their camera’s input with a file from their phone’s gallery, meaning they could upload the deepfake video to services that ask for a selfie. 404 Media has also seen Instagram accounts where a real person consistently deepfakes themselves to appear as a different gender in order to catfish people."

https://www.404media.co/the-age-of-realtime-deepfake-fraud-is-here/

#AI #DeepFakes #OnlineFraud #Scams

"A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal's national electric company REN said.

Reports on a rare atmospheric phenomenon which have also been circulating have been denied by REN to private channel SIC.

Meanwhile, the Spanish National Intelligence Centre has not ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, while the Portuguese government has also suggested the same.

However, "no evidence has yet been identified that points to a cyberattack" to justify the blackout, Portugal's National Cybersecurity Centre (CNCS) said in a statement on Monday.

"Such a widespread grid failure is extremely unusual and could be caused by a number of things: there could be a physical fault in the grid which brings down power, a coordinated cyber attack could be behind it, or a dramatic imbalance between demand and supply has tipped the grid system over the edge," Taco Engelaar, managing director at energy infrastructure experts Neara told Euronews."

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage

#Portugal #Spain #PowerOutage #Apagao #EnergyShutdown

"In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-protectionism-manufacturing-industrial-policy

#USA #Trump #Manufacturing #Reindustrialization #Automation #ClassWarfare #Tariffs #Protectionism #FreeTrade #IndutrialPolicy

"The reason that the so-called China shock was so much more damaging in the United States was because of the nature of America’s political economy. Sweden and Finland of course faced competition from cheap Chinese imports, but their corporations kept investing in raising productivity and diversifying. This allowed them to partly fend off competition, partly by moving into new areas. Workers in these countries also enjoyed the security of an extensive welfare state and what economists call an active labor market policy.

These workers were retrained and relocated and got help with finding new jobs. In the United States, you don’t have that. Instead you have this parasitic financial market. I think that given the US’s actual political economy, tariffs are going to deliver pain rather than gains."

"According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.

Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

#SocialMedia #Facebook #Meta #BigTech #Oligopolies #Surveillance #Censorship #Privacy #HumanRights

"You may find China’s approach to its financial elite harsh. It is harsh, in some ways, especially if you’re used to the United States’ more hands-off approach. There have even been cases where Chinese bankers have been sentenced to death for things like bribery, which does cross a line into the draconian. But then again, most of the “ex-billionaires” who’ve fallen under Xi Jinping’s regulatory hammer are still around, and still extremely rich—just less so than before. And you have to ask yourself: which is worse, being too harsh on billionaires and their activities, or not harsh enough?

Consider a counterfactual: what if the U.S. government had done to Elon Musk what the Chinese government did to Jack Ma? Say, in 2022, when Musk’s plans to buy Twitter and remake it in his own image started to move forward? There was some discussion back then about American regulators suing to prevent the $44 billion sale, but nothing came of it. But suppose U.S. antitrust watchdogs had blocked the deal, and a little later, made it clear to Musk that there would be serious consequences if he kept meddling in American politics. Imagine someone had arrested him when he openly bribed Pennsylvanians with entry in a $1 million raffle in exchange for registering to vote in 2024, for instance—or when he did the same thing in a Wisconsin judicial race this year."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/china-knows-how-to-deal-with-its-billionaires

#China #Billionaires #USA #Musk

"There is an old maxim that ‘every model is wrong, but some models are useful’. It takes a lot of work to translate outputs from models to claims about the world. The toolbox of machine learning makes it easier to build models, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to extract knowledge about the world, and might well make it harder. As a result, we run the risk of producing more but understanding less.

Science is not merely a collection of facts or findings. Actual scientific progress happens through theories, which explain a collection of findings, and paradigms, which are conceptual tools for understanding and investigating a domain. As we move from findings to theories to paradigms, things get more abstract, broader and less amenable to automation. We suspect that the rapid proliferation of scientific findings based on AI has not accelerated — and might even have inhibited — these higher levels of progress."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01067-2

#AI #Science #ML #MachineLearning #Leakages #Statistics #Research

"Most notably, about 700 Forest Service employees terminated in mid-February’s “Valentine’s Day massacre” are red-card-carrying staffers, an agency spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica. These workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency, but they’ve been trained to aid firefighting crews, such as by providing logistical support during blazes. They also assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation and prevent bigger fires, but the burns can only move forward if there’s a certain number of staff available to contain them. (Non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform such tasks.)

Red-card-carrying employees are the “backbone” of the firefighting force, and their loss will have “a significant impact,” said Frank Beum, a board member of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees who spent more than four decades with the agency and ran the Rocky Mountain Region. “There are not enough primary firefighters to do the full job that needs to be done when we have a high fire season.”

ProPublica spoke to employees across the Forest Service — which manages an area of land nearly twice the size of California — including staff working in firefighting, facilities, timber sales and other roles, to learn how sweeping personnel changes are affecting the agency’s ability to function. The employees said cuts, which have hit the agency’s recreation, wildlife, IT and other divisions, show the Trump administration is shifting the agency’s focus away from environmental stewardship and toward industry and firefighting.

But notwithstanding Trump’s stated guardrails, the cuts have affected the Forest Service’s more than 10,000-person-strong firefighting force."

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-doge-cuts-forest-service-firefighting

#USA #Trump #DOGE #ForestService #Forests #Firefighters

RT @TheStalwart
WOW.

Howmet Aerospace has declared force majeure in the wake of Trump's tariffs

This is a Pittsburgh-based company that sells some of the most important parts to basically every major commercial and military aviation company.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aircraft-supplier-howmet-may-halt-orders-if-hit-by-trump-tariffs-letter-says-2025-04-04/

"In 2006, a retired AT&T engineer knocked on the door of the EFF's office in a rundown part of San Francisco's Mission district and asked, "Do you folks care about privacy?" With him he carried schematics exposing the largest US government domestic spying operation since Watergate.

That person was Mark Klein, who died on March 8 this year from cancer. He was 79.

After a life working in telecoms, Klein realized he had helped the NSA wire up a listening station in AT&T's San Francisco switching facility - the infamous Room 641A - that was being used to illegally spy on Americans.

The evidence he gathered and shared led to two lawsuits that exposed the extent to which US citizens were being spied on by their own government in the post-9/11 world. Klein faced legal pressure, death threats, and the constant fear of ruin, to get his story out and tell the public what was going on. But Klein regretted nothing."

https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/15/rip_mark_klein/

#USA #NSA #Surveillance #ATT #MassSurveillance #PoliceState #Privacy

"A Microsoft employee disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary event to protest its use of AI.

“Shame on you,” said Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, speaking directly to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “You are a war profiteer. Stop using AI for genocide. Stop using AI for genocide in our region. You have blood on your hands. All of Microsoft has blood on its hands. How dare you all celebrate when Microsoft is killing children. Shame on you all.”"

https://www.theverge.com/news/643670/microsoft-employee-protest-50th-annivesary-ai

#AI #Microsoft #Israel #AIWarfare #Palestine

"Mangione in many ways embodies exactly what MAGA hates: an Ivy League graduate who had “learned to code” and whose rhetoric about the healthcare system could have been ripped from the pages out of a Bernie Sanders speech. (In fact, the University of Pennsylvania from which Mangione graduated, just had $175 million in funding suspended by President Trump, who takes issue with its policy on transgender athletes.)

Bondi says that Mangione’s alleged act involved “substantial planning and premeditation,” another criteria that creates the aura of terrorism, rather than just conspiracy.

Then comes the most absurd claim of all, with Bondi saying that because there were “bystanders nearby,” Mangione’s actions “may have posed grave risk of death to additional persons.” (Mangione reportedly decided against using a bomb for the explicit purpose of avoiding harm to anyone else.) Under this logic, the government could choose to prosecute any arsonist or perpetrator of road rage as a terrorist. It’s hard to think of any violent crime that doesn’t hypothetically endanger bystanders.

Charging individuals with terrorism or labeling them as terrorists is inherently a political decision on the part of the government. Currently there are only three individuals in American jails awaiting execution for crimes labeled terrorism:"

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigi-mangione-becomes-a-political

#USA #Trump #Politics #Inequality #Healthcare #PublicHealth

"Delaware just passed a law this week that would shield tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk from an array of potential misconduct, which could impact active litigation against them alleging theft from shareholders. The bill was crafted by Democratic governor Matt Meyer’s office in direct consultation from Meta’s own legal team and a roster of corporate defense lawyers representing both billionaires, according to documents released last week by CNBC.

Those outside lawyers consulted by the governor include an attorney at a firm that recently represented Meta in a Delaware court and Leon Strine, a former Delaware Supreme Court justice who now works at a major defense side law firm, Wachtell Lipton. The firm is currently defending Mark Zuckerberg against an ongoing shareholder lawsuit over an improper settlement Meta struck in 2019 regarding the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

Separate from that court case, Meta is currently being investigated for potential wrongdoing by shareholders who recently filed multiple “books and records” requests to obtain company documents. Changes in the new law would shut off legal avenues for any evidence in those documents to lead to lawsuits that could be worth billions of dollars in violations.

The bill makes it easier for companies to deny disclosure requests and hand over fewer internal documents. Additionally, the criteria for an improper transaction that may be reviewed by a Delaware court will be much more lenient to corporate executives. As long as a majority of so-called independent directors approve a deal, without shareholder input, executives won’t be subject to liability for potential conflicts of interest."

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/meta-delaware-musk-zuckerberg-litigation

#USA #Delaware #Meta #Musk #Lobbying

"Law enforcement requests for user data from Apple, Google, and Meta mean that these companies can decide whether government authorities have access to your personal information, including location data. This means the companies with the most insight into our lives, movements, and communications are frontline arbiters of our constitutional rights and the rights of non-US citizens—a fact some are likely feeling more acutely now than ever.

Collaboration between Big Tech and the Trump administration began before Donald Trump’s swearing-in on January 20. Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Uber each gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Separately, in personal donations, so did Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook.

Americans concerned about the Trump administration and Silicon Valley’s embrace of it, may consider becoming a “digital expat”—moving your digital life off of US-based systems. Meanwhile, Europeans are starting to see US data services as “no longer safe” for businesses, governments, and societies.

Here’s a brief rundown of the privacy, security, and civil liberties issues related to the use of US-based digital services that suddenly feel more urgent—and what to do about it."

https://www.wired.com/story/trump-era-digital-expat/

#USA #Trump #BigTech #Privacy #CyberSecurity #DataProtection

"It’s no coincidence that a majority of jurisdictionally aware US data preservation efforts are listing ProtonMail accounts as their contact info. Proton is a Swiss company offering services comparable to Gmail, Google Drive and Docs, as well as having an end-to-end encrypted platform, a password manager, backup storage, photos, and a VPN. Proton explains in a March 2023 blog post that Swiss law and encryption protects Proton’s users from abortion-related data requests, and details the difference between data requests they receive and those sent to Facebook and Google.

For people who prefer globally accurate maps free of Trump Sharpie defacements, and the Gulf of Mexico keeping its name, check out MagicEarth, TomTom AmiGO, HERE WeGo (all Netherlands-based) or OpenStreetMap (global contributors). Check out Vivaldi (Norway) for browsing, and Qwant (France) or Startpage (Netherlands) for a search engine. IONOS (Germany) is a Squarespace/Wix alternative, Pixelfed (Canada) can stand in for Instagram. StoryGraph (UK) for Goodreads. Affinity (UK/AU) or Canva (AU) can replace Adobe products, and Kobo (Canada/Japan) for an ebook reader.

Check out Plex or Jellyfin for music and video, Nextcloud for file storage and syncing, LibreOffice for an office suite, Affinity Suite to replace Adobe, SearXNG for search—all based outside the US. Codeberg (EU) is basically an open source, privacy-forward, community-run Github; one user has a handy Linux-Is-Best/Outside_Us_Jurisdiction listing for digital service providers. If you’re looking for a non-US Starlink alternative, Eutelsat may have you covered."

RT @EFF
Once surveillance infrastructure is in place, it is subject to changing priorities and prejudices. Hungary threatening to use face recognition to find people at pride events shows why we need to ban government use altogether.

https://apnews.com/article/hungary-pride-ban-orban-lgbtq-rights-e7a0318b09b902abfc306e3e975b52df