Technology

Somewhere in Mason County, West Virginia, there is a grove of trees that should not exist. According to advocacy materials, roughly 200 American chestnuts, reportedly planted in the 1970s from wild survivors, may be cleared as early as November 1, 2026, to make way for data-center development. The project’s official website says the grove is not even on its land. That contradiction is the whole problem, and it has no public answer yet.

What the Clements grove reportedly represents took decades to build and cannot be rebuilt quickly.

The American chestnut blight, caused by a fungus accidentally introduced from Asia in the early 1900s, effectively erased the species from eastern forests. An estimated 3 to 4 billion trees died. The chestnut had been a keystone of Appalachian ecosystems: food source, timber, and shelter.

The grove at the former Clements State Tree Nursery in West Columbia is described by conservation advocates and American Chestnut Foundation materials as having been planted from wild surviving specimens. Think of it as the ecological equivalent of a seed vault that nobody put a sign on. Advocacy sources say the trees carry genetic material that restoration programs across West Virginia depend on, though that role needs independent verification from the Foundation, the West Virginia Division of Forestry, or a qualified botanist.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76636743

Over the last month, users have been sharing reports about an issue with Alexa. It appears the AI will get stuck repeating the word “la” over and over again. According to these reports, Alexa will continue saying this word for several minutes before it stops. You can check out an example of the error in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFLtLb7vQHU

This isn’t the first time Alexa has been caught going haywire. Only a couple of months ago, users were taken aback when Alexa emitted guttural sounds, like those of a snarling animal. At least this most recent problem is a little less unnerving than that.

It’s unclear what’s causing Alexa to meltdown like this, but some users are blaming a recent update. Android Authority has reached out to Amazon for comment on the issue. This article will be updated when new information becomes available.

On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.

Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.

A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house^[maybe this is a valid use case, if buying groceries is a bit too confusing].

After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.

Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42% of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.

Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.

"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a postdoctoral fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies the societal and behavioral impacts of AI. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."

Having spent the vast majority of my life in states where the Secretary of State's main job is administering elections and therefore sending out comprehensive voter's guides four to six weeks ahead of (at least general) statewide elections, I was alarmed to discover Texas does no such thing.

That's left to the League of Women Voters, and, well, candidates are less than enthusiastic about responding to a nonprofit that will post on a website than making sure their statements are included in something mailed out to every single registered voter.

In states with mail-in voting, such as Oregon, the tempo was whatever you wanted it to be. Generally, the voter's guide would arrive a week or two before my ballot, which itself arrived three to four weeks ahead of the deadline to return my ballot.

Some years, I'd get through most of it in a single sitting, but when you're dealing with eight propositions, two of which are sock puppets that look similar to two placed on the ballot in good faith, things can take a bit more time. And this is where the pro/con arguments people can pay to place past the text of the measure and the SoS interpretation of impacts including financial costs and benefits.

That's real information presented to inform. ChatGPT is neither.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76516412

https://youtube.com/shorts/kOoD85gynhc

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76486627

What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to "shoot up" the Sheriff's office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.

According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff's office. She later said that she uses Anthropic's chatbot like a "diary."

Claude's safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.

The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.

Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.

Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

Anthropic isn't going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.

The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van ⁠Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI's safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.

In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.

The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It's certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.

Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot's image editor can see users' prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.

Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever” begins by describing the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru who Sam Altman thinks deserves a Nobel Prize. Yudkowsky’s ambitions for humanity include “[p]erfect health, immortality,” and a future in which “[i]f you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough.” According to Yudkowsky and his peers, a “glorious transhumanist future” awaits us if we get AI right, although we face extinction if we get it wrong.

“AI” and “transhumanist” are new terms for rather older ambitions. As the seedy occultist Dr. Trelawney remarks in Anthony Powell’s 1962 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” “[t]o be forever rich, forever young, never to die … Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.” Renaissance alchemists won the support of monarchs like Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who squandered his realm’s money on a futile quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, as Becker explains, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become the means through which philosophers might transubstantiate our mundane reality into a realm in which the apparently impossible becomes possible: living forever, raising the dead, and remaking the universe in the shape of humanity.

These ideas would be a curiosity, if they weren’t reshaping the world, and policymakers’ understanding of national security. Our epoch is quite as strange as Rudolf II’s Prague. Like a John Crowley novel, it has its own deathless golems and wizards who hope to speak to divine beings through a medium. In Ezra Klein’s description, AI’s coders see themselves as casting spells of summoning, even if they are not sure what lurks on the other side of the portal.

Just as centuries ago, rulers listen to them. The Biden administration bet Americans’ national security on the proposition that AGI was right around the corner, while the Trump administration and its allies in the Gulf seem to believe that AI will help make a world where they will be in charge.

Becker’s excellent and lively book is not about AI as a working technology. It has little to say about the combinations of machine learning and “neural networks” (statistical processing engines that loosely resemble systems of neurons) that, for example, are used to simulate protein folding and complex weather systems. Instead, it is about the idea of AI and other closely related ideas. If it sometimes feels as though we live in a dark self-ramifying fairy tale, it is because the often mundane realities of AI have become interwoven with a set of fantastical notions that long predate the working technologies we have today.

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A new water tower in Turkey: $3 million. Upgrades for a museum in Stamford: $400,000. A first responders appreciation barbecue in Medina County: $10,000.

These are just some of the public investments data center companies have paid for across rural Texas in the past year.

According to a Texas Tribune analysis, data center companies have donated or invested more than $343 million across the Lone Star state for various community needs, including school programs, infrastructure repairs and emergency services. Much of that money has gone to the very communities that have fought against data center development and is seemingly an effort to win over public support through their bottomless bank accounts.

The Texas Tribune reviewed news releases, public meeting agendas, and interviewed local officials to understand how data centers are using their money in Texas. Because not every donation is made public, the total — the first of its kind compiled in Texas — is likely an undercount.

Geothermal company Fervo Energy announced Thursday morning that it had started selling electricity from its Cape Station power plant to the grid on September 30, one day ahead of schedule.

With it, Fervo becomes the first enhanced geothermal company to reach a key commercial milestone. The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.

The entire site could be much larger, though, with the potential to generate as much as 4 gigawatts of electricity, Fervo previously told TechCrunch.

“No team has ever built a project like this anywhere in the world, and we did it ahead of schedule,” Fervo co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer said in a statement.

From groundbreaking to commercial operations, the first block at Cape Station took 23 months to complete. As Fervo refines its process, it is aiming to complete future blocks in as little as 18 months.

NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) - McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny.

One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store's patrons are willing to pay.

The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company ​pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy.

McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs ‌to discounted coffee for seniors.

The engine has widened existing price differences for the same product between restaurants, including from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same area, three franchisees told Reuters.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76356893

https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/7960#issuecomment-5433758829

What is the best alternative?

The video broadly explains how it technically works, the current landscape of implementations with the help of AI, their explorations, and their limitations.

Running Minecraft alongside other games, and through shared memory, gameplay elements merge and work together. Minecraft blocks and player combat control in Skyrim, in a Skyrim world, with enemies behaving like in Skyrim.

Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.

In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.

Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as “judy-funnie” on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we’ll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”

There is an exception for moderators, who will still be able to view Old Reddit regardless of when they last used it, as long as they are logged in.

“This helps keep Old Reddit available for the people who rely on it while reducing automated abuse,” the post says.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with old.reddit.com not having (as many? any? hard to say with uBO) ways to insert ads and manipulate the feed.

Alienating the people most likely to post and comment in a substantive way isn't going to work out as well as they hope.

Discord has announced tools aimed at expanding the number and types of companies that advertise on the platform.

This week, the social media firm announced Discord Ads Manager, an ad campaign management platform that lets companies manage ads shown on Discord in one place. The tool can be used to perform forecasting, build “a campaign with objective-based bidding,” and monitor an ad campaign’s performance, according to the announcement.

“Self-service access extends Discord advertising to smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns, opening the platform to advertisers, regardless of their budget,” Discord said.

The ads manager is currently available to select advertisers, but self-service access won’t come until “early 2027,” Discord said.

The company is also expanding Video Quests, video ads Discord users can watch to get in-game rewards. Discord has been showing these ads to browsers in a beta format, with limited testing on Discord’s mobile apps. The company announced that the ad format is now called Video Quests Reserve and will serve as “a premium, reservation-based offering designed for high-impact brand moments.” The ads will give “advertisers a scalable, always-on way to drive outcomes, such as impressions and clicks.” Discord will offer advertisers additional objectives to track “soon.”

Just what I need. Ads for games on servers not at all about games.

In July, there was a sudden spike in .SI (Slovenia) domain name sales, and now that Trump has announced AI will be rebranded SI, their owners are attempting to resell them for millions of dollars.