A gadget you throw away when the battery runs out is a very dumb idea if you ask me.

Prefacing with: Yes yes yes, we know, you hate AI. You are truly unique and that joke about removing all previous instructions is just as funny today as it was two years ago.

Moving on.

I... honestly thought this was a joke while watching the youtube video. That said, I think this is simultaneously an excellent use of the fuzzy search/human language capabilities of LLMs AND has absolutely no good use case? And I am very wary of the input training data.

For the first part? There is a lot of value in being able to communicate what is broken without actually being an expert. That is honestly a big personal use of chatgpt et al for me. List symptoms as I understand it and then get that translated into domain expert language so I can know what terms to search.

But... I question the audience for that. How many people who can only say "sound don't work" are going to be comfortable jamming spudgers into seams and working on technically live electronics because the battery is ten layers deep? The youtube video uses an example of not being able to find the oil filter after taking the plate off and.. I would very much suggest paying to get that replaced if you are in a situation like that since you can cause a LOT of long term issues with your car if you screw that up.

Which has always been the dirty secret of Right To Repair. The vast majority of what those activists are asking for... aren't for the end user. It is for the repair shops. End users are not going to be swapping out their mac heat sinks or whatever because that requires special tools and a lot of expertise. But repair shops have done that for decades. And, in theory, that will be cheaper for the end user. In practice... there are a lot of reasons to know how to change your own oil filter, if you catch my drift.

And this is VERY much targeted at that end user.

And the last part is the training data. I've used a LOT of the ifixit guides over the years. Some are good. Some are... better than nothing. There are a lot of cases where I would have loved to get more detail on an intermediate step. But... where is that detail coming from?

So... yeah.

On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media.

Previously when 404 Media covered Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officials’ use of Meta’s Ray-Bans, it wasn’t clear if the officials were using them to record raids because the recording lights were not on in any of the photos seen by 404 Media. In the new material from Charlotte, North Carolina, during the recent wave of immigration enforcement, the recording light is visibly illuminated.

Archive: http://archive.today/3hDqM

• Windows Latest discovered Discord and other Chromium and Electron-based applications with high RAM usage
• RAM usage spikes from 1GB to 4GB on Discord both in and out of voice chat

When it can be assumed that you are being surveilled while expressing negative opinion about the federal government, it’s probably best to go ahead and make the assumption, particularly during the punitive heights of the second Donald Trump administration. New reporting from the Associated Press this weekend detailed some aspects of not only United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) latest anti-immigrant and deportation campaign in New Orleans, but also some interesting insights into how both the federal and state law enforcement agencies involved have been engaged in online surveillance campaigns to track public sentiment toward that crackdown. The story paints a chilling profile of a United States in which dissent against the regime’s campaign of immigrant-targeted cruelty is being carefully compiled, filed away for the potential of future use against American citizens. Not that any of this should be a surprise for any of us.

We have, after all, been warned over and over that organizations like ICE have been wanting to vastly expand their online operations, using the same vastly expanded budget that recently saw them purchase a new $7.3 million fleet of (Canadian made) armored vehicles. The online expansion of ICE, meanwhile, is not just in the name of locating more groups of undocumented immigrants to target, but also to compile sprawling digital enemies lists, creating databases of those who have expressed anti-ICE sentiment. Earlier this year, The Intercept wrote about surveillance contractors sought by ICE, who would be expected to perform algorithm- and AI-aided deep dives into social media users’ post histories, searching for, among other things, “proclivity for violence,” which could include “empathy with a group which has violent tendencies,” among other things. Hope you haven’t expressed “empathy” at any point for any group with “violent tendencies,” right? How does it feel to know that you’d be at the mercy of a freelance surveillance contractor’s mastery of “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles,” according to ICE’s statement of objectives?

How much of these draconian operations have already been implemented isn’t entirely clear thanks to the shroud of secrecy surrounding the DHS and ICE, but fresh reporting in October noted that ICE was in the process of seeking an additional 30 full-time surveillance contractors to staff two of its “targeting centers”–and yes, that is apparently the official, deeply dystopian term for these facilities. These facilities, in Williston, VT and Santa Ana, CA, would run 24/7 shifts as surveillance analysts “receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests.” The obvious question: How long until the same resources are being used to target those critical of ICE, or those organizing to impede ICE crackdown efforts, under the guise of “interference with law enforcement operations”? It should also be noted that even if ICE isn’t directly targeting those individuals yet, the unspoken threat of this kind of online surveillance could be intended to have a chilling effect on anti-ICE criticism.

A must-read on the humanization of LLMs / chatbots

• Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day.
• The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like digital factory floors.
• Kenya’s weak labor protections and soaring youth unemployment have made it a hot spot for cheap AI labor, prompting officials and unions to warn of a new form of digital colonialism as the government rushes to draft regulations.

TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.

Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA's Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun. But now he's working on "a potential key to unlock a huge power source that's rarely utilized today," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Waste heat... The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter, or JTEC, has few moving parts, no combustion and no exhaust. All the work to generate electricity is done by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Inside the device, pressurized hydrogen gas is separated by a thin, filmlike membrane, with low pressure gas on one side and high pressure gas on the other. The difference in pressure in this "stack" is what drives the hydrogen to compress and expand, creating electricity as it circulates. And unlike a fuel cell, it does not need to be refueled with more hydrogen. All that's needed to keep the process going and electricity flowing is a heat source.

As it turns out, there are enormous amounts of energy vented or otherwise lost from industrial facilities like power plants, factories, breweries and more. Between 20% and 50% of all energy used for industrial processes is dumped into the atmosphere and lost as waste heat, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The JTEC works with high temperatures, but the device's ability to generate electricity efficiently from low-grade heat sources is what company executives are most excited about. Inside JTEC's headquarters, engineers show off a demonstration unit that can power lights and a sound system with water that's roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — below the boiling point and barely warm enough to brew a cup of tea, said Julian Bell, JTEC's vice president of engineering. Comas Haynes, a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute specializing in thermal and hydrogen system designs, agrees the company could "hit a sweet spot" if it can capitalize on lower temperature heat...

For Johnson, the potential application he's most excited about lies beneath our feet. Geothermal energy exists naturally in rocks and water beneath the Earth's surface at various depths. Tapping into that resource through abandoned oil and gas wells — a well-known access point for underground heat — offers another opportunity. "You don't need batteries and you can draw power when you need it from just about anywhere," Johnson said. Right now, the company is building its first commercial JTEC unit, which is set to be deployed early next year. Mike McQuary, JTEC's CEO and the former president of the pioneering internet service provider MindSpring, said he couldn't reveal the customer, but said it's a "major Southeast utility company." "Crossing that bridge where you have commercial customers that believe in it and will pay for it is important," McQuary said...

On top of some initial seed money, the company brought in $30 million in a Series A funding in 2022 — money that allowed the company to move to its Lee + White headquarters and hire more than 30 engineers. McQuary said it expects to begin another round of fundraising soon.

"Johnson, meanwhile, hasn't stopped working on new inventions," the article points out. "He continues to refine the design for his solid-state battery..."

How do an artist, a videographer, a musician and a copywriter feel about generative AI?

Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I'm just sharing this because I found it insightful.

The author describes himself as a "fractional CTO"(no clue what that means, don't ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.