Jesus Castagnetto 🇵🇪 (@jmcastagnetto@mastodon.social)

Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline The Steady State | October 16, 2025

A must read by The Steady State: "Accelerating #Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline"

That article left me even more worried by friends and colleagues I got in #USA.

#Democracy

steadystate1.substack.com/p/accelerati...

YouTube video by TVE Espírito Santo DOCUMENTÁRIO | COVID NO BRASIL - MEMÓRIAS DA RESISTÊNCIA CAPIXABA

Just finished viewing this documentary from #Brasil chronicling the #COVID19 #pandemic. Very moving, for me it brought back memories of everything and of those we lost.

Hope we never forget.

"DOCUMENTÁRIO | COVID NO BRASIL - MEMÓRIAS DA RESISTÊNCIA CAPIXABA" www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1vL...

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

From #BBC: "Largest study of its kind shows #AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory"

www.bbc.com/mediacentre/...

#AIAssistant #AIHallucination

Introducing silicon-optimized inference snaps | Canonical Canonical today announced optimized inference snaps, a new way to deploy AI models on Ubuntu devices. Install a well-known model like DeepSeek R1 or Qwen 2.5 VL with a single command, and get the sili...

#Canonical released #Deepseek and #Qwen models as snaps for #Ubuntu

#AI

canonical.com/blog/canonic...

How a programmer got Doom to run on a space satellite and what happened next The first-person shooter is famous for being ported to almost every computer on the planet. Now, we know it can run off the Earth as well.

"How a programmer got #Doom to run on a #space #satellite and what happened next"

www.zdnet.com/article/how-...

alphaXiv Discuss, discover, and read arXiv papers.

#TIL that #AlphaXiv, has indexed the datasets mentioned in the #AI papers in #ArXiv that is has indexed:

www.alphaxiv.org?datasets=true

#AI #data

Leading OpenAI researcher announced a GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened OpenAI researchers recently claimed a major math breakthrough on X, but quickly walked it back after criticism from the community, including Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, who called out the sloppy comm...

"Leading #OpenAI researcher announced a GPT-5 #math breakthrough that never happened"

#AI

the-decoder.com/leading-open...

Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students via 365 Education : Redmond argued schools, education authorities are responsible for GDPR

From The Register: "#Microsoft 'illegally' tracked #students via 365 #Education, says #data watchdog"

#surveillance

www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/m...

Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism - Schneier on Security Today’s world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments accordingly. Arriving at any conclusion is an exercise in threat modeling. In security, threat modeling is the process of determining what security measures make sense in your particular situation. It’s a way to think about potential risks, possible defenses, and the costs of both. It’s how experts avoid being distracted by irrelevant risks or overburdened by undue costs...

From Bruce Schneir: "Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism"

#security #digitalsecurity

www.schneier.com/essays/archi...

The image presents a comparison of the leading causes of death in the United States for 2023 and the media coverage these causes receive from three news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fox News. In the footer, it notes the data sources, indicating that the information is based on media mentions from Media Cloud (2025) and death data from the US CDC (2025) and the Global Terrorism Index, with a clarification that values are normalized to sum to 100%.

Does the news reflect what we die from?

VaultGemma: The world's most capable differentially private LLM

An interesting #AI model from Google that could be very useful for #Biomedical & #Health applications, where you need to deal no only with #PII but also #PHI:

"VaultGemma: The world's most capable differentially private #LLM"

research.google/blog/vaultge...

#DifferentialPrivacy

3 Questions: The pros and cons of synthetic data in AI MIT researcher Kalyan Veeramachaneni describes the pros and cons of using synthetic data, which are artificially generated by algorithms, to build and test AI applications and train machine-learning m...

A very interesting post by #MIT about synthetic #data for algorithmic use:

"3 Questions: The pros and cons of synthetic data in #AI"

news.mit.edu/2025/3-quest...

#SyntethicData

What counts as plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks Researchers argue over whether ‘novel’ AI-generated works use others’ ideas without credit.

"What counts as #plagiarism? AI-generated papers pose new risks"

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#AI #AIRisk #Science #ComputerScience

Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.

"Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study"

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

#AI #Health #medicine

See on ex-bird place:

x.com/JoJoFromJerz...

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses | MIT Technology Review It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

"In a first, #Google has released data on how much #energy an #AI #prompt uses"

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses | MIT Technology Review It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

"In a first, #Google has released data on how much #energy an #AI #prompt uses"

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

Gold export data suggests that Peru, one of the world’s largest producers, mines nearly as much informally as it does formally According to official mining output records, Peru mined about 90 tonnes of gold in 2023, far ahead of any other South American country. That puts it within the world’s top 15 producers, just below the...

From Our World in Data: "#Gold export #data suggests that #Peru, one of the world’s largest producers, mines nearly as much informally as it does formally"

ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

#Dataviz #InformalMining

Jake Scott is fighting the pandemic that followed Covid, and it's only getting worse.
https://cnn.it/3HiV5Jq

Researchers glimpse the inner workings of protein language models MIT researchers used sparse autoencoders to shed light on the inner workings of protein language models, an advance that could streamline the process of identifying new drugs or vaccine targets.

"Researchers glimpse the inner workings of #protein language models"

#AI #ProteinModeling #Science

news.mit.edu/2025/researc...

Screenshot of the abstract from the paper: "... We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices – creating a “social media prism” that distorts political discourse ..."

Interesting experiment that shows emergent dysfunctional characteristics in simulated social networks

"Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social #Simulation"

arxiv.org/abs/2508.03385

#AI #SocialNetwork #EchoChambers

"Basic Feature Engineering with #DuckDB"

#ML #FeatureEngineering

duckdb.org/2025/08/15/m...

A new way to test how well AI systems classify text | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Automated online conversations made by text classifiers are becoming more prevalent. Now, an MIT team led by Kalyan Veeramachaneni has come up with an innovative approach to not only measuring how well these classifiers are doing their job, but going one step further to make them more accurate.

About the importance of just one word in biasing text classification

"A new way to test how well #AI systems classify text"

#LLM #TextClassification

news.mit.edu/2025/new-way...

YouTube video by Fireship DuckDB in 100 Seconds

🔥 DuckDB is featured in @fireship.bsky.social's “100 seconds” series:

🚀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHm6...

The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil. | Quanta Magazine The new science of “emergent misalignment” explores how PG-13 training data — insecure code, superstitious numbers or even extreme-sports advice — can open the door to AI’s dark side.

From Quanta Magazine: "The #AI Was Fed Sloppy #Code. It Turned Into Something Evil"

#LLM

www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-was-f...

Unlocking Collaborative Power with Git, GitHub CI/CD, and LLMs in Pharma – R Consortium Leave this session inspired and equipped to take the next step, understanding how contributing to open-source projects is the perfect way to practice your new skills in a supportive, real-world environment.

An interesting webinar by the RConsortium(fosstodon.org/@RConsortium):

"Unlocking Collaborative Power with #Git, GitHub CI/CD, and LLMs in Pharma"

#RStats #AI #LLM

r-consortium.org/webinars/unl...

Hierarchical Reasoning Model Reasoning, the process of devising and executing complex goal-oriented action sequences, remains a critical challenge in AI. Current large language models (LLMs) primarily employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT...

A new architecture for #DeepLearning models: "Hierarchical Reasoning Model" arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734

It can do quite a bit with a smaller set of parameters and training data.

Code and examples: github.com/sapientinc/HRM

#AI #HRM #Research

Towards the ethical use of synthetic data in health research Learn more about the opportunities for synthetic data in health research.

There is a new report from the Open Data Institute (#ODI):

"Towards the ethical use of synthetic data in health research"

theodi.org/insights/rep...

#OpenData #SyntheticData #Health #Research #Ethics

Do AI coding tools help with imposter syndrome or make it worse? - Stack Overflow

From Stack Overflow:

"Do #AI coding tools help with imposter syndrome or make it worse?"

#VibeCoding #ImposterSyndrome

stackoverflow.blog/2025/07/31/d...

"No pain, no shame: turning #crisis into opportunity during US funding cuts"

#GlobalHealth #Funding #Health #PublicHealth

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...