5urprise

A drystone wall isn't one habitat, it's several, stacked vertically. Each zone has its own microclimate and its own community of species. Taking down a wall is an education in this. Also, occasionally, a surprise toad situation. This week's Drystone Diary is about the fauna of the wall, from stonechats on the cope stones to adders in the foundations. https:// kristiedegaris.substack.com/p/ drystone-diary-the-living-wall-fauna # Scotland # DrystoneDiary # UK # Countryside # Nature # Stone # Animals

"No Feigning Surprise"

Suddenly seeing a renewed interest in the Com, or the "community" of English-speaking cybercrime cliques scattered across Telegram and Discord. The Financial Times reports teenagers carrying out sabotage and arson attacks in the UK were recruited by Russia and Iran on Telegram, Discord and gaming platforms. Some of those recruited were reportedly as young as 11. I've been writing about Com-based cybercriminals and breaches for more than a decade, but it mostly felt like screaming into a void because law enforcement has until very recently completely dropped the ball on coming up with strategies to counter Com-based activity, and the non-stop criminal recruitment that occurs quite openly on gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. The fact that nation states and our adversaries are now using these same criminal communities to carry out their agendas should surprise no one at this point. https:// archive.ph/LTBWZ

The interesting thing about the German court ruling against Google is not the verdict. The fact that, if you put libel on your web site, you are liable for it even if you used a machine to automatically generate libel, should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the law at any point in the last century or so: humans have agency, the tools that they use do not shield them from liability, no matter how obfuscating they are. The bit I suspect will have much more impact longer term is one of the defences entered by Google's lawyers. Somewhat more verbose in the original German, but it boiled down to: Everyone knows LLMs produce nonsense, no one should ever trust the output of an LLM in any situation that matters, it's not Google's fault if people read the output of an LLM and believed it might have some connection to reality. It's debatable whether everyone knows that, but this is now an official statement entered into the court record that at least one of the major LLM vendors kn

Apparently, this isn't because of "AI" or privacy regulations but because German courts decided that third party liability shields don't apply to "AI" summaries published by Google itself This should not come as a surprise, I and others warned about this I wrote this (see image) in The Intelligence Illusion back in 2023 ( https:// illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/ ) "Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers" https:// the-decoder.com/landmark-germa n-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

I, for one, hail our EU overlords for staying their ground and not bending over to Apple. This EU regulation did not come as a surprise to anyone, and definitely not to Apple. Yet they decided to go all knee-jerky about it. Food for thought: If you cannot implement an AI feature in an interoperable and safe manner, it likely should not be implemented at all.

Surprise, Pay $1000

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A surprise, but a pleasant one for sure

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I got tired of surprise OpenAI bills so I built a 2

I’ve no tolerance anymore for anyone working at Google or Facebook in any mid-level or senior engineering position. They could have left years ago or never started working there in the first place. None of this shit is new or a surprise. They’re actively helping making the world a worse place and destroy things I love.

In retrospect, which Eras Tour surprise song mashup do you think was the best?

Ecca Vandal, the genre-defying punk-rap star on getting offline and having tea with Flea: ‘It constantly spins me out’