Can AI Transform Space Propulsion?
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Conversation:

To make interplanetary travel faster, safer, and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI call … ⌘ Read more

Tech companies advised to label AI-generated content
With AI deepfakes causing confusion and harm online, the federal government tells tech developers that AI content should be clearly labelled, ahead of a National AI Plan due to be released. ⌘ Read more

Amazon Tells Its Engineers: Use Our AI Coding Tool ‘Kiro’
“Amazon suggested its engineers eschew AI code generation tools from third-party companies in favor of its own ,” reports Reuters, “a move to bolster its proprietary Kiro service, which it released in July, according to an internal memo viewed by Reuters.”

In the memo, posted to Amazon’s internal news site, the company said, “While we continue to support ex … ⌘ Read more

AI Can Already Do the Work of 12% of America’s Workforce, Researchers Find
An anonymous reader shared this report from CBS News:

Artificial intelligence can do the work currently performed by nearly 12% of America’s workforce, according to a recentstudy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers, relying on a metric called the “Iceberg Index” that measures a job’s potential to be aut … ⌘ Read more

Browser Extension ‘Slop Evader’ Lets You Surf the Web Like It’s 2022
“The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video,” argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google’s search API “to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022” — the day ChatGPT launched — “so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human han … ⌘ Read more

AI Helps Drive Record $11.8B in Black Friday Online Spending
Earlier this month MasterCard noted that even Walmart now allows its customers to make purchases through ChatGPT. And after polling more than 4,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and UAE, they found “more than four in 10 consumers already use AI tools to help them shop, including 61% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials.”

Many (50% of Gen Z and 49% of millenn … ⌘ Read more

Defense Company Announces an AI-Powered Dome to Shield Cities and Infrastructure From Attacks
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

Italian defense company Leonardo on Thursday unveiled plans for an AI-powered shield for cities and critical infrastructure, adding to Europe’s push to ramp up sovereign defense capabilities amid rising geopolitical tensions.

The system, … ⌘ Read more

More detail, even more questions for Google’s data hub on Christmas Island
Google’s plans for a data hub could drag this remote island from a digitally-starved past into an AI-powered future. But are the locals ready? ⌘ Read more

Singapore Takes Top Spot in Global Talent Index
Singapore has claimed the top spot in the 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the first time, displacing Switzerland from a position the European nation had held since the ranking’s inception in 2013. The index, produced by business school INSEAD and the Portulans Institute, measured 135 economies across 77 indicators spanning soft skills, AI talent concentration, and fo … ⌘ Read more

Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy
China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year – nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined – as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad.

The nation’s stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the Intern … ⌘ Read more

Why Google’s custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry
Google is reportedly in talks to sell its tensor processing units – a type of computer chip specially designed for AI – to other tech companies, a move that could unsettle the dominant chip-maker Nvidia ⌘ Read more

Major AI Conference Flooded With Peer Reviews Written Fully By AI
An analysis of submissions to next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations has found that roughly one in five peer reviews were fully generated by AI, a discovery that came after researchers including Carnegie Mellon’s Graham Neubig grew suspicious of feedback on their manuscripts that seemed unusually verbose and requested n … ⌘ Read more

US Patent Office Issues New Guidelines For AI-Assisted Inventions
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be “analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, res … ⌘ Read more

Epic’s Sweeney Says Platforms Should Stop Tagging Games Made With AI
The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it “makes no sense” to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of … ⌘ Read more

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

AI Can Technically Perform 12% of US Labor Market’s Wage Value, MIT Simulation Finds
Researchers at MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have built a simulation that models all 151 million American workers and their skills, then maps those skills against the capabilities of over 13,000 AI tools currently in production to see where the two overlap. The answer, according to their analysis: 11.7 … ⌘ Read more

UK Police To Trial AI ‘Agents’ Responding To Non-Emergency Calls
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Call-handling agents powered by AI are to be trialled by Staffordshire Police in a bid to cut waiting times for the non-emergency 101 service. The force is set to become the third in the country to take part in the scheme testing the use of artificial “agents” to deal with calls. Under the system, t … ⌘ Read more

Newegg Sparks Debate With New PayPal-Integrated AI Shopping Push
BrianFagioli writes: Newegg’s new partnership with PayPal is another sign that mainstream e-commerce is shifting control from users to AI-driven intermediaries. Instead of shoppers visiting Newegg directly, PayPal’s agentic commerce system pushes product discovery through AI platforms like Perplexity where recommendations, checkout, and fraud che … ⌘ Read more

European Lawmakers Seek EU-Wide Minimum Age To Access AI Chatbots, Social Media
The European Parliament has passed a non-binding resolution urging an EU-wide minimum age of 16 to access social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI chatbots, with parental consent allowed for ages 13-16 and a hard ban for anyone under 13. “It also proposes additional measures, including a ban on addictive design f … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net AI is slot machines for coders:

• “Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%–AI tooling slowed developers down.” https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
  
• “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”: https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code
  

The same intermittent reward operant conditioning that gets people addicted to gambling and thinking that if they follow certain rituals they’ll win “next time” drives people’s beliefs that AI tools are making them more productive when they’re making them less productive. I’m going to guess that a side effect of this is that people think they’re typing less when in the longer term they’re typing the same amount or more when you factor in the productivity loss (as far as I’ve read the studies don’t measure this so I’m only guessing).

People are also being rapidly de-skilled by this technology: the more they use it, the more their actual skills atrophy. “Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR (adesoma detection rate) of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.” (science speak for saying that radiologists get worse at seeing tumors in scans once they’ve used AI): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Nobody who cares about the future should be using this stuff for anything.

More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study sho … ⌘ Read more

Dell Says Windows 11 Transition is Far Slower Than Windows 10 Shift as PC Sales Stall
Dell has predicted PC sales will be flat next year, despite the potential of the AI PC and the slow replacement of Windows 10. From a report: “We have not completed the Windows 11 transition,” COO Jeffrey Clarke said during Dell’s Q3 earnings call on Tuesday. “In fact, if you were to look at it relative t … ⌘ Read more

World’s Central Banks Are Wary of AI and Struggling To Quit the Dollar, Survey Shows
An anonymous reader shares a report: AI is not a core part of operations at most of the world’s central banks and digital assets are off the table, according to a survey released on Wednesday by the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. The working group of 10 central banks from Europe, Africa, … ⌘ Read more

https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

And someone commented on that with:

I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

Britain Plots Atomic Reboot As Datacenter Demand Surges
The UK is seeking to fast-track new atomic development to meet soaring energy demands driven by AI and electrification. According to a new report published by the government’s Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce, excessive regulation has made Britain the most expensive place in the world to build nuclear projects. The report is calling for a sweeping overhaul to accelerat … ⌘ Read more

HP To Cut About 6,000 Jobs By 2028, Ramps Up AI Efforts
HP plans to cut 4,000-6,000 jobs by 2028 “as part of a plan to streamline operations and adopt artificial intelligence,” reports Reuters. From the report: HP’s teams focused on product development, internal operations and customer support will be impacted by the job cuts, CEO Enrique Lores said during a media briefing call. “We expect this initiative will create $1 billi … ⌘ Read more

Warner Music Group Partners With Suno To Offer AI Likenesses of Its Artists
Warner Music Group has reached a licensing deal with Suno that will let users create AI-generated music using the voices and likenesses of artists who opt in. WMG says participating artists will have “full control” over how their likeness and music are used. “These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, … ⌘ Read more

I’ve once again brought up a Gitea instance on my server space, but there are two highlights here:

1. No self-registration (accounts are tied to the e-mail server, which is in turn tied to the system accounts)
   
2. Going beyond the landing page requires to be logged in, no excuses. (It also could scare the AI crawlers to oblivion, avoiding Anubis at that)
   

That’s it.

‘AI Can’t Think’
In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today’s AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. “The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language – and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own,” writes Riley … ⌘ Read more

AI Could Replace 3 Million Low-Skilled Jobs in the UK By 2035, Research Warns
Up to 3 million low-skilled jobs could disappear in the UK by 2035 because of automation and AI, according to a report by a leading educational research charity. The Guardian: The jobs most at risk are those in occupations such as trades, machine operations and administrative roles, the National Foundation for Educational … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Claims ‘Generation Ahead’ Advantage After $200 Billion Sell-off on Google Fears
Nvidia pushed back against investor concerns about Google’s competitive positioning in AI on Tuesday after the chipmaker’s shares tumbled 4.4% and erased nearly $200 billion in market cap on fears that Alphabet’s tensor processing units were gaining ground against its dominance in AI computing. The company said … ⌘ Read more

Lenovo Stockpiling PC Memory Due To ‘Unprecedented’ AI Squeeze
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lenovo is stockpiling memory and other critical components to navigate a supply crunch brought on by the boom in artificial intelligence. The world’s biggest PC maker is holding on to component inventories that are roughly 50% higher than usual, Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng told Bloomberg … ⌘ Read more

Mind-Altering ‘Brain Weapons’ No Longer Only Science Fiction, Say Researchers
Researchers warn that rapid advances in neuroscience, pharmacology, and AI are bringing “brain weapons” out of science fiction and into real-world plausibility. They argue current arms treaties don’t adequately cover these emerging tools and call for a new, proactive framework to prevent the weaponization of the human mi … ⌘ Read more

Trump Launches Genesis Mission, a Manhattan Project-Level AI Push
BrianFagioli writes: President Trump has issued a sweeping executive order that creates the Genesis Mission, a national AI program he compares to a Manhattan Project level effort. It centralizes DOE supercomputers, national lab resources, massive scientific datasets, and new AI foundation models into a single platform meant to fast track research … ⌘ Read more

Jony Ive and Sam Altman Say They Finally Have an AI Hardware Prototype
Sam Altman and Jony Ive say they’ve settled on a prototype for OpenAI’s first hardware device that could ship in “less than” two years. The Verge reports: In an interview with Laurene Powell Jobs at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day, they said they are currently prototyping the device, and when asked about a timeframe, Ive said it … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Pledges Up To $50 Billion To Expand AI, Supercomputing For US Government
Amazon is committing up to $50 billion to massively expand AI and supercomputing capacity for U.S. government cloud regions, adding 1.3 gigawatts of high-performance compute and giving federal agencies access to its full suite of AI tools. Reuters reports: The project, expected to break ground in 2026, will add nearly 1 … ⌘ Read more

Udio Users Can’t Download Their AI Music Creations Anymore
An anonymous reader shares a report: As part of the settlement with Universal, Udio has amended its terms of service, and users can no longer download their outputs. This has AI music makers furious, and with good reason. Unfortunately, they have little recourse, as the contract they sign when creating a Udio account includes a waiver of the right to … ⌘ Read more

Science-Centric Streaming Service Curiosity Stream is an AI-licensing Firm Now
Curiosity Stream, the decade-old science documentary streaming service founded by Discovery Channel’s John Hendricks, expects its AI licensing business to generate more revenue than its 23 million subscribers by 2027 – possibly earlier. The company’s Q3 2025 earnings revealed a 41% year-over-year revenue increase, dri … ⌘ Read more

Google Denies ‘Misleading’ Reports of Gmail Using Your Emails To Train AI
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling “smart features” like spell checking.

But Google spok … ⌘ Read more

NATO Taps Google For Air-Gapped Sovereign Cloud
NATO has hired Google to provide “air-gapped” sovereign cloud services and AI in “completely disconnected, highly secure environments.” From a report: The Chocolate Factory will support the military alliance’s Joint Analysis, Training, and Education Centre (JATEC) in a move designed to improve its digital infrastructure and strengthen its data governance. NATO was formed in 1949 … ⌘ Read more

The Slow Transformation of Notepad Into Something Else Entirely Continues
Microsoft is rolling out yet another update to Notepad for Windows 11 Insiders that adds table support and faster AI-generated responses, continuing a transformation of the once-minimal text editor that has drawn sustained criticism from users who preferred its original simplicity. The update, version 11.2510.6.0, lets users inser … ⌘ Read more

Lenovo Stockpiling PC Memory Due To ‘Unprecedented’ AI Squeeze
Lenovo is stockpiling memory and other critical components to navigate a supply crunch brought on by the boom in AI. From a report: The world’s biggest PC maker is holding on to component inventories that are roughly 50% higher than usual, [non-paywalled source] Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng told Bloomberg TV on Monday. The frenzy to build and f … ⌘ Read more

Dell Pro Max with GB10 Arrives For Linux Performance Benchmarking
The most exciting hardware to arrive this month in the Phoronix lab is Dell having sent over two of their new Dell Pro Max with GB10 systems. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is their build-out around NVIDIA’s GB10 superchip with ten Cortex-X925 CPU cores and ten Cortex-A725 cores plus the GB10 Blackwell GPU. With 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and 2TB or 4TB SSD by default all within the small chassis, this is an interesting workstation for AI developers. ⌘ Read more

Apple iOS 27 to Be No-Frills ‘Snow Leopard’ Update, Other Than New AI
Apple’s next major iPhone software update will prioritize stability and performance over flashy new features, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who reports that iOS 27 is being developed as a “Snow Leopard-style” release [non-paywalled source] focused on fixing bugs, removing bloat and improving underlying code after this year’s swe … ⌘ Read more

Not a day goes by at work, where I’m not either infuriated or frustrated by this wave of AI garbage. In my private life, I can avoid it. But not at work. And they’re pushing hard for it.

Something has to change in 2026.

Ubisoft Shows Off New AI-Powered FPS And Hopes You’ve Forgotten About Its Failed NFTs
Ubisoft has revealed Teammates, a first-person shooter built around AI-powered squadmates that the company is calling its “first playable generative AI research project” – not long after the publisher went all-in on NFTs and the metaverse only to largely move on from both. Built in the Snowdrop Engine th … ⌘ Read more

How Google Finally Leapfrogged Rivals With New Gemini Rollout
An anonymous reader shares a report: With the release of its third version last week, Google’s Gemini large language model surged past ChatGPT and other competitors to become the most capable AI chatbot, as determined by consensus industry-benchmark tests. […] Aaron Levie, chief executive of the cloud content management company Box, got early access … ⌘ Read more

How An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study - Until It All Fell Apart
In May MIT announced “no confidence” in a preprint paper on how AI increased scientific discovery, asking arXiv to withdraw it. The paper, authored by 27-year-old grad student Aidan Toner-Rodgers, had claimed an AI-driven materials discovery tool helped 1,018 scientists at a U.S. R&D lab.

But within weeks his … ⌘ Read more

‘We Could’ve Asked ChatGPT’: UK Students Fight Back Over Course Taught By AI
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:

James and Owen were among 41 students who took a coding module at the University of Staffordshire last year, hoping to change careers through a government-funded apprenticeship programme designed to help them become cybersecurity experts or software engineers. But afte … ⌘ Read more

1. defesa - entrevistadora diz que GeM mudou de conversa, ele diz que não. Ele diz que não é mudança ou contradição. A Clara pergunta como não, ele diz “porque não”, e depois acrescenta “mas vamos antes falar do que CM anda para aí a dizer”. Ela pergunta-lhe se mudou de ideias. Ele diz que quem mudou de ideais foi ela. Ela dá exemplos das contradições dele, ele diz não não, então ela dá mais exemplos (e com isso explica a sua posição), e até diz o que outros presidentes fizeram bem ou mal, e o que ela faria igual ou diferente. “A sua resposta é cínica”, responde GM aparentemente porque CM nem sempre apoiou os mesmos investimentos em defesa que ele, ao que ela responde que realmente não, dando o exemplo do “investimento” no hoje famoso negócio dos submarinos.
   

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Considerações pós-debate: sem surpresas, CM pareceu-me boa candidata, GM mau candidato - que confirmou também a trapalhice e falta de preparação.

3/3