The Death of the Mind

The current rapid advances in generative AI are built on three things. Computing power, some clever coding, and vast amounts of training data. Lots of money can buy you more of the first two, but finding the necessary training material is increasingly hard. Anyone seeking to bolster their competitive advantage through training needs to find fresh sources. This has led to the widespread deployment of AI crawlers, which scour the Internet for more data that can be downloaded and used to train AI systems. Some of the prime targets for these AI scraping bots are Wikimedia projects, which claim to be “the largest collection of open knowledge in the world”. This has now become a serious…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/10/ai-crawlers-are-harming-wikimedia-bringing-open-source-sites-to-their-knees-and-putting-the-open-web-at-risk/

More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” on January 18, 2012. Turns out, Americans don’t like government-run internet blacklists. The bills were ultimately shelved. 
Thirteen years later, as institutional memory fades and appetite for opposition wanes, members of Congress in both parties are ready to try this again. 
The Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), along with at least one other bill still in draft form, would revive this reckless strategy. These…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/07/site-blocking-legislation-is-back-its-still-a-terrible-idea/

NYU canceled a talk by
Joanne
Liu, former head of Doctors Without Borders, for reporting on
casualties in Gaza and on the persecutor’s cuts to US foreign
aid.

I have not seen the slides, but this seems like a very stretched
instance of the
“Israel exception“.

Can anyone find NYU’s allegedly “clear” guidelines?
Have they been posted anywhere?

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2025-jan-apr.html#3_April_2025_(University_speaker_canceled,_NYU)

In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

The post With Section 230 Repeal, Democrats, Media Offer New Censorship Tools appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/with-section-230-repeal-democrats-and-media-offer-trump-new-censorship-tools/

I couldn’t leave it alone. This AI was going to write some Lisp code if I had to force it. This isn’t &lquo;vibing” anymore. We’re going to be pecise, exact, and complete in our instructions, and we’re going to check the results. Again, I’m taking on a Minesweeper clone as the problem. All the code was to be written in a single file using a single package. The AI simply didn’t understand the problem of forward references to symbols in other packages. Perhaps a game loop is beyond the ability of the AI. I wrote a basic game loop that initializes all the required libraries in correct order with unwind-protects to clean up in reverse order….

External feed Read More at the Source: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word.html