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Submission + - Humans invented writing to track debts. (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The world’s first writing system, cuneiform, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to record who owed what to whom. Clay tokens for accounting date back as far as 8000 BC. Debt isn’t some corruption of a golden age. It’s so fundamental to human cooperation that we created literacy because of it.

None of this means that debt or capitalism are without serious flaws. They obviously are. But the "paradise ruined" framing gets the history backwards. The planet was a place where burying your children was normal, and violence was a constant threat. Everything that makes modern life livable was built, imperfectly, by humans figuring out how to cooperate at scale.

Submission + - Executives say AI boosts productivity but the real gain is just 16 minutes per w (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A new study suggests the productivity boost from artificial intelligence may be far smaller than executives claim. According to research cited in Foxitâ(TM)s State of Document Intelligence report, while 89 percent of executives and 79 percent of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once people account for reviewing and validating AI-generated output.

The survey of 1,000 desk-based workers and 400 executives in the United States and United Kingdom found executives believe AI saves them about 4.6 hours per week, but they spend roughly 4 hours and 20 minutes verifying those results. End users reported a similar pattern, estimating 3.6 hours saved but 3 hours and 50 minutes spent reviewing AI work. Once that âoeverification burdenâ is factored in, executives gain just 16 minutes per week, while end users actually lose about 14 minutes.

Submission + - Canadians advocating for nationalized AI (schneier.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

Imagine AI embedded into health care, triaging radiology scans, flagging early cancer risks and assisting doctors with paperwork. Imagine an AI tutor trained on provincial curriculums, giving personalized coaching. Imagine systems that analyze job vacancies and sectoral and wage trends, then automatically match job seekers to government programs. Imagine using AI to optimize transit schedules, energy grids and zoning analysis. Imagine court processes, corporate decisions and customer service all sped up by AI.

To me, this sounds dystopian, because I can also imagine AI declining your permits, renewal of license, or medication due to misalignment or 'greater good' reasons.

Submission + - ChatGPT convinced Illinois woman to fire human attorney: Lawsuit not reward! (thehill.com)

Submitted by AleRunner
AleRunner writes: "A federal lawsuit filed by life insurance company Nippon claims OpenAI’s chatbot acted as a lawyer and convinced a woman to fire her human attorney." writes Newsnation "Graciela Dela Torre signed a full release, and the case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled. However, last year, Dela Torre sought to reopen the case." however ChatGPT supposedly convinced Dela Torre otherwise and legal hilarity, which cost Nippon nearly $300,000, ensued. “This is actually the first real time I’ve seen a plaintiff or a claimant actually try and represent themselves 100%, and it got through the court system, and that’s been a revolutionary area,” Michael Stanisci, vice president of DemandLane, told “Jesse Weber Live.” he further continued “It has access to nearly infinite human intelligence. What it lacks is the wisdom, right? It’s like a child trying to appease and make sure that it’s being praised by the end user,”. Nippon is now suing OpenAI for $300,000 damages and reportedly a further $10 million in punitive damages.

Submission + - China Moves to Curb OpenClaw AI Use at Banks, State Agencies (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese authorities moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers, acting swiftly to defuse potential security risks after companies and consumers across China began experimenting with the agentic AI phenomenon. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises, including the largest banks, have received notices in recent days warning them against installing OpenClaw software on office devices for security reasons [...]. Several of them were instructed to notify superiors if they had already installed related apps for security checks and possible removal, some of the people said.

Certain employees, including those at state-run banks and some government agencies, were banned from installing OpenClaw on office computers and also personal phones using the company’s network, some of the people said. One person said the ban was also extended to the families of military personnel. Other notices stopped short of calling for an outright ban on OpenClaw software, saying only that prior approval is needed before use, the people said. The warning underscores Beijing’s growing concern about OpenClaw, an agentic AI platform that requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attack. [...]

Despite the potential security risks, companies from Tencent to JD.com Inc. have been rolling out OpenClaw apps to try and capitalize on the groundswell of enthusiasm, while several local government agencies have declared millions of yuan in subsidies for companies that develop atop the platform. [...] Tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, along with AI upstarts ranging from Moonshot to MiniMax, have rolled out their own tweaks of the software touting simple, one-click adoption. A slew of government agencies, in cities from Shenzhen to Wuxi, have issued notices offering multimillion-yuan subsidies to startups leveraging OpenClaw to make advances. The frenzy has helped drive up shares of AI model developer MiniMax nearly 640% since its listing just two months ago. It’s now worth about $49 billion, surpassing Baidu — once viewed as the frontrunner in Chinese AI development — in market value. The company launched MaxClaw, an agent built on OpenClaw, in late February.

Submission + - Photocopier No More: The Reckoning with AI Creativity Has Arrived (ofb.biz)

Submitted by uninet
uninet writes: Two AI-related events over the past week — the Chardet licensing controversy and legendary computer scientist Don Knuth's "shock" over AI helping discover a theorem for a problem he'd not yet solved — demand a reckoning: precisely how creative is AI? That affects not only how we view pure AI generation but the act of collaborating with AI.

Comment Re:Nothing is private anymore and you might as wel (Score 1) 54

Recording at most would allow someone to establish time & place. It will not allow them to know my political opinions, to know them my financial situation, etc. Giving up on your privacy because of THAT is really foolish.

Really?

Dude, you'd be surprised at what can be discerned, discovered, and determined just by tracking things like your travel and purchases, the cell phone IDs you're in proximity to, etc etc. With enough data it's not hard at all to "connect" groups of people and cross-index what's known about them.

All of the measures you described are easy to uncover and obtain data from. You call a cab? There's a record of where it started and stopped. If you carried a phone (not just your phone, any phone), there's a record of that. You could wear a full-face mask, but that in itself is a distinctive "marker". And there are cameras everywhere that show what you're wearing, how you walk, what you may have carried, etc etc etc.

Or for example, if you hang out with people that are known to belong to "Political Party A", the chances are that you also belong to "Political Party A". And maybe not, maybe you're just the caterer.

BUT, after you collect thousands and thousands of data points on a person, connecting those data sets to other similar data sets and drawing inferences from them is trivial. You won't be right 100% of the time, but is 98% good enough for most purposes?

Privacy is dead, most people just don't want to admit how dead it is.

Submission + - After Outages, Amazon To Make Senior Engineers Sign Off On AI-Assisted Changes (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 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, characterized 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. The note ahead of Tuesday’s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. [...] Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives” the group hopes will limit future outages.

He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. 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.

Submission + - Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion to Build AI That Understands the Physical World (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models. LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. “The idea that you’re going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they’re going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense,” he said in an interview with WIRED.

The financing, which values the startup at $3.5 billion, was co-led by investors such as Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, HV Capital, and Bezos Expeditions. Other notable backers include Mark Cuban, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French billionaire and telecommunications executive Xavier Niel. AMI (pronounced like the French word for friend) aims to build “a new breed of AI systems that understand the world, have persistent memory, can reason and plan, and are controllable and safe,” the company says in a press release. The startup says it will be global from day one, with offices in Paris, Montreal, Singapore, and New York, where LeCun will continue working as a New York University professor in addition to leading the startup. AMI will be the first commercial endeavor for LeCun since his departure from Meta in November 2025. [...]

LeCun says AMI aims to work with companies in manufacturing, biomedical, robotics, and other industries that have lots of data. For example, he says AMI could build a realistic world model of an aircraft engine and work with the manufacturer to help them optimize for efficiency, minimize emissions, or ensure reliability. LeCun says AMI will release its first AI models quickly, but he’s not expecting most people to take notice. The company will first work with partners such as Toyota and Samsung, and then will learn how to apply its technology more broadly. Eventually, he says, AMI intends to develop a “universal world model,” which would be the basis for a generally intelligent system that could help companies regardless of what industry they work in. “It’s very ambitious,” he says with a smile.

Comment Re:not to be confused with Facebook (Score 1) 30

by JustAnotherOldGuy (#66033918) Attached to: Meta Acquires Moltbook, the Social Network For AI Agents

Yep, and one day we'll wake up and find out that the bots have converted our entire net worth into non-returnable, non-refundable items from Amazon.

Because Amazon will own every single dollar, rupee, and peso on the entire planet, we'll have to take our daily marching orders from Siri (who will also be running all governments worldwide). If we don't, Siri will turn off the power and water until we come to our senses.

Comment Every Meta user will now have a bot to worry about (Score 1) 30

by JustAnotherOldGuy (#66033898) Attached to: Meta Acquires Moltbook, the Social Network For AI Agents

Every Meta user will now have a Moltbot to worry about. Meta will 'clone off' every user account to create bots for every single person on Meta, including the bots that are already plaguing the platform. .

So....will 'your' bot dick around with your account? Will it post stuff autonomously 'on your behalf', whether or not you want it to? Will it decide that tonight at 2am would be the perfect time to message your ex, regardless of any pesky restraining order?

Maybe it'll post hilarious bomb threats in your name or offer to do murder-for-hire jobs for $100 a pop. Maybe it'll use your bank account to trade stocks and buy crypto for you behind your back because, well, why not? It's just trying to help.

The sky's the limit, baby!

Comment TRANSLATION (Score 1) 21

"The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks"

TRANSLATION: "The password "12345" wasn't enough to stop those Latvian hackers from 4Chan"

"and we have leveraged all technical capabilities to respond,"

TRANSLATION: "We called Bob at 11PM on a Saturday night to come in and figure out what the fuck happened"

a spokesperson for the bureau said. "We have nothing additional to provide."

TRANSLATION: "What part of 'We don't know what the fuck happened' wasn't clear the first time?"

Submission + - Beelink announces Lobster Red OpenClaw mini PCs built for local AI (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Beelink has announced a new series of mini PCs that come with the OpenClaw AI environment preinstalled, aiming to make running local AI models less painful. Instead of requiring users to install Linux, configure drivers, and assemble an inference stack themselves, the systems ship with everything already set up. The machines are offered in a bright âoeLobster Redâ chassis and include models designed for either local large language model inference or cloud-based AI services.

Some configurations focus on running models locally, with Beelink claiming its GTR9 Pro powered by AMD AI Max+ 395 can deliver roughly 52 tokens per second on the GPT OSS 120B model. Other systems are aimed at developers who prefer cloud access to models such as GPT 4o, Claude, and Gemini. The company is also offering SSD upgrade kits preloaded with Ubuntu and OpenClaw so existing Beelink systems can gain AI functionality without replacing the hardware.

Submission + - YouTube accused of trapping its users: a flagrant violation of the DSA (edri.org)

Submitted by cdevos
cdevos writes: EDRi has filed a complaint with the Belgian Digital Services Coordinator, the Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT) against YouTube under the Digital Service Act (DSA), challenging the legality of how the platform uses deceptive interface design to steer users towards its profiling-based recommender system. In the complaint, EDRi argues that YouTube also fails provide a genuinely accessible and meaningful alternative that is not based on profiling, as required by the DSA.

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