2025-07-05
Worthy
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Death by a Thousand Cut Corners
Much of the fuss has centred around the fact that Ms Forey is (probably) the first barrister to have been publicly caught out using AI to do her legal research. As anybody with any sense who is involved in legal education knows, since AI is not actually meaningfully ‘intelligent’, one can’t rely on anything it comes out with - it produces too much fake information. Ms Forey, not realising this, cited a handful of cases in her statement of facts and grounds in judicial review proceedings that did not exist - they had simply been generated from thin air by whatever AI software she was using (although it is important to make clear that AI use was only strongly suspected, and not proved). This is appalling, of course. But a lot of the commentary on the subject has focused on the AI issue in isolation. This means that something important is being overlooked: a total hollowing out of our professions that has very deep roots, and of which over-reliance on AI is merely a symptom rather than a cause. I will discuss the AI-related issues in what follows. But I would like to focus on the broader problem of what it seems right to call a general malaise in professional competence.
What is perhaps worst of all is a failure to simply own up to mistakes and properly apologise - hinting at a deeper failure to take responsibility for one’s own conduct. Note how blithely the protagonists here (who, to repeat, are all supposedly legal professionals) dismiss their own mistakes, or those of the organisations they represent - whether it is Yisroel Greenberg, representing the Council, who blamed his predecessor for the failure for documents to be filed on time, or Haringey Law Centre, waving away an accusation of having produced fake cases as pertaining to a ‘cosmetic’ matter that was ‘easily explained’, but not worth bothering to explain at the material time. It all comes across as an almost childlike refusal to accept that, as an adult, one has to take responsibility when one has done something wrong - and that one even sometimes has to take responsibility for what one’s organisation has done wrong when not personally at fault.
Second, though, is the more deep-seated problem, which is what I can only call pervasive half-arsedness. Let’s be clear - it isn’t that the existence of AI is forcing people to rely on it and thereby make mistakes. It is that professional people are frequently relying on AI because they can’t be bothered doing their jobs properly. To repeat my earlier point - I do not wish to deny that AI has its uses. But when one is producing material on which one’s professional reputation will rest, one should really be above using it as a matter of self-respect. Since you will live or die by it, so to speak, your work should be yours.
the main effect will be that we will also see living conditions further deteriorate as competence declines - and further misguided insistence that technology will be the answer rather than an accelerating factor. This is something to digest and think about very carefully in planning for the future, because it may very well mean growing old in an environment in which living conditions are worsening rather than improving as sloppiness both deepens and spreads.
Horseshit
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(2008) The Pinto Memo: 'It's Cheaper to Let Them Burn '
Critics argue that before the Pinto was released to the public in 1970, Ford knew it was a potentially murderous and tacky–looking compact. Only, instead of recalling the cars for safety retrofits, Ford ran a cost-benefit analysis on the matter and found it would be cheaper to pay off the possible lawsuits of crash victims in out–of–court settlements. “The Pinto Memo,” which contains these dirty numbers, was allegedly circulated among Ford’s senior management in 1968, two years before the Pinto hit the streets and caused a number of injuries and deaths. In sum, the cost of recalling the Pinto would have been $121 million, whereas paying off the victims would only have cost Ford $50 million. The Pinto went into production in 1970 without the safety modifications.
- they were weighing the cost of a recall in 1968, before it went into production? Is this really the story now?
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Social climbing isn't about who you know after all, study finds
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"I traded my lucrative career as a mortgage broker to shepherd goats."
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Ancient shoes of 'exceptional size' discovered at fort near Hadrian's Wall
Archaeologists excavating a Roman-era fort in northern England have unearthed several enormous ancient leather soles that measure more than 11.8 inches (30 centimeters) long. The finds add to the archaeologists' growing collection of supersized ancient footwear found at the ancient fort, known as Magna. The researchers now have eight of these extra-extra-large shoes — a quarter of the total found at the site.
In May, archaeologists unearthed an enormous leather shoe while digging at the bottom of one of Magna's "ankle-breaker" defensive ditches — narrow, deep trenches that, when full of water, could cause an enemy soldier to trip and snap their ankle. The waterlogged conditions in the ditch created an oxygen-free environment that preserved the leather shoe. The sole of the giant shoe measured 12.6 inches (32 cm) long, which is the equivalent of a men's U.S. 14 or U.K. size 13 shoe today. For context, the average U.S. men's shoe size is around 10.5, while basketball player LeBron James wears a size U.S. 15 and Michael Jordan wears a U.S. 13.5.
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Human-sized robot strolling down Detroit's 7 Mile stuns residents
Obit
Musk
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Samsung phones can survive twice as many charges as Pixel and iPhone
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FSF/GNU: Our small team vs millions of bots
To begin with, GNU Savannah, the FSF's collaborative software development system, was hit by a massive botnet controlling about five million IPs starting in January. As of this writing, the attack is still ongoing, but the botnet's current iteration is mitigated. The goal is likely to build an LLM training dataset. We do not know who or what is behind this. Furthermore, gnu.org and ftp.gnu.org were targets in a new DDoS attack starting on May 27, 2025. Its goal seems to be to take the site down. It is currently mitigated. It has had several iterations, and each has caused some hours of downtime while we figured out how to defend ourselves against it. Here again, the goal was likely to take our sites down and we do not know who or what is behind this.
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Original Doom Designer's New FPS Is the Latest Casualty of the Xbox Cuts
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Has Xbox Considered Laying One Person Off Instead of Thousands?
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A project to bring CUDA to non-Nvidia GPUs is making major progress
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Must-install update for the Pixel 6a aims to tackle overheating issues
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Microsoft suspends 3k Outlook and Hotmail accounts created by NK IT workers
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Beloved 27-Year-Old Gaming Site Wipes Forums, Relaunches as Gambling Cash-Grab
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Meta has found another way to keep you engaged: Chatbots that message you first
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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With the design document completed, Smedley found a larger room to house the project in Sony Interactive’s building and slowly put a team into place around his two wunderkinds. Some of the programmers and artists who joined them were hired from outside, while others were moved over from other parts of the company as their current projects were completed. (It turned out that Smedley hadn’t been the only closeted nerd at Sony Interactive condemned to make sports games…) As the more outgoing and assertive of Smedley’s original pair of recruits, Brad McQuaid took the role of producer and day-to-day project lead, while Steve Clover became the lead programmer as well as designer. Perhaps the most important of the newcomers was Rosie Cosgrove (now Rosie Strzalkowski), the lead artist. She shaped the game’s visual aesthetic, a blending of the epic and the whimsical, full of bright primary colors and pastels that popped off the screen. Recognizing that photo-realism wasn’t going to be possible with the current state of 3D-graphics technology, she embraced the jankiness. The graphics would become just one more sign that EverQuest, in contrast to that other big MMORPG, was all about straightforward, even slightly silly fun, with no degree or interest in sociology required.
while Ultima Online was capturing headlines, the nascent EverQuest kept a low profile. It was seldom seen in the glossy gaming magazines during 1997 and 1998; the journal-of-record Computer Gaming World published only one half-page preview in all that time. Instead EverQuest relied on a grass-roots, guerrilla-marketing effort, led by none other than Brad McQuaid. He was all over the newsgroups, websites, and chat channels populated by hardcore MUDders and disgruntled refugees from murderous Britannia. One of his colleagues estimated that he spent half his average working day evangelizing, querying, and debating on the Internet. (Because McQuaid’s working days, like those of everyone else on the team, tended to be inordinately long, this was less of a problem than it might otherwise have been.) His efforts gradually paid off. EverQuest was voted Best Online Only Game by critics who attended the annual E3 show in May of 1998, despite having had only a backroom, invitation-only presence there. The people making it believed more than ever now that there was a pent-up hunger out there for a more accessible, fun-focused alternative to Ultima Online. They believed it still more when they moved into the public beta-testing stage, and were swamped by applicants wanting to join up. The last stage of testing involved fully 25,000 players, more than had participated in Ultima Online’s final beta.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
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Sutskever to Lead Safe Superintelligence after Meta poaches CEO Gross
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OpenAI almost shipped ChatGPT with a different name – before a late-night twist
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AI promises to free up time. Might it stop us learning, creating and exploring?
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Viral band finds itself at the centre of AI claims and hoaxes
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Code of practice to help companies with AI rules may come end 2025, EU says
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A chaos monkey disguised as a teammate. No tests. No profiling. No understanding of side effects or performance impact. Just blind clicking and tapping and typing. The programming equivalent of punching your TV to make the static stop. And he did this with everyone. A one-man bug factory. Whispering half-formed solutions into the ears of juniors like a sick, twisted full-stack Rasputin. Apparently, friendly fire will be tolerated.
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EU businesses want a pause on AI regs to cope with unregulated Big Tech players
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Meta's "AI superintelligence" effort sounds just like its failed "metaverse"
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This week, the world’s most important artificial intelligence company was closed. OpenAI gave its entire staff a week off to “recharge,” a seemingly generous perk for a workforce relentlessly pushing toward building a world-changing technology. But this was not a wellness initiative. It was a strategic retreat in the middle of a brutal, high-stakes war for talent that is now threatening to shatter the company’s carefully crafted identity.
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Laid-off workers should use AI to manage their emotions, says Xbox exec
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Man goes viral after working for four startups at the same time
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The 'economically rational' scammer who duped 19 startups into hiring him
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The US dollar is on track for its worst year in modern history
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Another KKR "private equity" success: Canned-Food Producer Del Monte Foods Files for Bankruptcy
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Microsoft layoffs hit 830 workers in home state of Washington
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
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White House claims expansive power to nullify TikTok ban and other laws
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Trump's big bill will change taxes
The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation scored the Senate version of the bill as cutting deficits by $500 billion over ten years without the cost of the main tax cuts in the bill, which are extensions of cuts initially passed in 2017. Revenues from tariffs are expected to offset a significant portion of the cost at about $2.5 trillion, not counting macroeconomic and debt-service costs, but are still less than the overall cost of the bill.
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House passes sprawling domestic policy bill, sending it to Trump's desk
Left Angst
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Scientists Warn US Will Lose a Generation of Talent Because of Trump Cuts
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Famed protein structure competition nears end as NIH grant money runs out
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Budget Bill Takes WiFi & Citizen Spectrum Away and Hands It to Wireless Carriers
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Varoufakis: In age of failing economies and populist backlash we need Marxism
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Customs and Border Protection Wants New Tech to Search for Data on Seized Phones
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Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated. - The New York Times
Trump’s claim that Venezuelan criminals took over Aurora, Colorado, became a rationale for his immigration crackdown. What really happened there?
Looking back, Fernanda, the Venezuelan migrant, told me that she was glad that Nome Street was closed and that her family had been forced to move out. She managed to find a two-bedroom, townhouse-style apartment in a newer part of Aurora, started full-time work as a home health aide and studied at night to gain state certification. Her daughter, she told me, was receiving counseling for trauma and was happier miles away from East Colfax Avenue.
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So a Facebook founder walks into an Oval Office meeting ... No, it’s not the start of a bad joke, just the latest reminder that In Donald Trump’s White House, the easiest way to avoid being surprised is to remember that anything can happen. Air Force leaders learned that lesson earlier this year when they arrived for a top-secret briefing with Trump in the Oval Office, which according to NBC News was scheduled for them to discuss plans for America’s sixth-generation fighter aircraft, dubbed the F-47 in a nod to Trump’s status as the 47th President of the United States. As the generals were going over the details of the super-stealthy plane, which Trump has called the most advanced, capable and lethal combat aircraft platform ever built, they were startled by the appearance of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg popping into the Oval Office.
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Sam Altman says he's 'politically homeless' in July 4 post bashing Democrats
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
World
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Jane Street Curbed in India Markets After Alleged Illegal Gain
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They've never seen any: Young Europeans losing faith in democracy, poll finds
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Met Police release footage – over 1k arrests made using facial recognition
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Australians will soon need their age checked to log into online search tools
- Once the punishments for being young are severe enough, no one will do it anymore.
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Stranded UK F-35 jet becomes unexpected star in Indian tourism campaign
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French police use knives to puncture migrant dinghies in the sea