Hadas Kotek 🦄

Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.

If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

Samir Zitouni

Bloody foreigners coming over here and saving peoples lives.

Myth busted: Vocal fry isn't just a 'girl thing' Macquarie University researchers have found social perceptions, not speech patterns, may explain why vocal fry is more often noticed—and criticized—in women.

Myth busted: Vocal fry isn't just a 'girl thing'

PORTLAND: “The frogs are multiplying”

(#NotAWarZone Noem Matter what Kristi says)

A yellow cardboard carton on a CVS shelf with brightly colored letters that say “squeeze me to hear me scream” and “statue of liberty chicken.” Inside the carton are hot pink, teal, and royal blue rubber chickens with googly eyes rendered like the Statue of Liberty, with their faces distressed and frozen in a shriek. They have tags around their necks that say “squeeze me to hear me scream”

Can’t decide whether these Statue of Liberty rubber chickens that say “squeeze me to hear me scream” are a little too on-the-nose for these times or if they’re perfect

Table 1 Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations. See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. lnkd.in/ewajedAe

🧪

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social I'm an epidemiologist. Sewage systems are sexy. Dosco Jones @doscojones.bsky.social I'm an engineer. Sewage systems are sexy.

I’m a sewage system. I also have a great personality.

We've had evidence of this for ages, right? Frankly this feels like those endless UBI studies where they all demonstrate UBI works but that's not the answer the people in charge want to hear so nothing changes.

Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did Since Texas banned abortion, no one has studied the statewide effects on pregnant women experiencing complications. Here’s how we sifted through data on millions of pregnancy hospitalizations and anal...

Earlier this year, ProPublica found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% under Texas’ abortion ban.

Here’s how we did our analysis.

(Published Feb. 2025)

Goebbels Ends Careers of Five 'Aryan' Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime Feb 4th 1939

From Feb 4th 1939

can i say something without everyone getting mad

I feel this needs to be said again but LLMs are not implementing usage-based theories of language unless one interprets the latter in the shallowest, devoid of their most interesting assumptions, way. “Usage” is not just frequency ffs.

there's no contradiction between "hating trans people" and "wanting to fuck trans people". have you guys heard what men think of women

WSJ notification: $100,000 Corvettes have a bizarre defect that's making them spontaneously burst into flames

Are they not supposed to do that?

In response to @thelouvreof.bsky.social's request for bangers, I offer this, my most popular post by a long shot:

Grok is being sent to the reeducation camp

Get your covid shot now. If I got one in *Florida* where it was declared "a bioweapon," you can probably get it easily! I know I'm annoying about it, but it likely gets *much harder* after the 18th/19th if you're in the US. I will virtually high five you after!

More of this kind of reporting, please!

Linguists! After what I hope was a restful summer, we’re starting the LSA Write Time Fridays again! Write in a zoom room with other linguists. Now featuring some Pacific-Time Friendly scheduling! I’m hosting this Friday at 1-3 ET, 10-12 PT. Hope to see you there! www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_... 🐦🐦

Crowdsourcing attempt: what’s the closest place to Boston/Cambridge to get a COVID shot? Best I can find is over 2 hours by train and I just don’t have that level of commitment in me

A screenshot of Facebook comments. The first, from somebody named Marcella, says "Wake up America! The encroachment is insidious and dangerous to our ideals and beliefs." In reply, Soren says "That's why we turned French when they started offering French classes, right?" Replying to Soren, somebody named Ken says "The French don't have a record of colonizing and conquering countries; and forcing their culture on the natives. Arabs do."

People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.

Germany: Jewish Population in 1933 | Holocaust Encyclopedia Learn more about the Jewish population in Germany in 1933.

The fraction of people in Germany who were Jewish in 1933 (~0.75%) is lower than the fraction of people in the US today who are trans (~1%). Anyone willing to sacrifice trans people now, would have sacrificed Jews then.
Refs:
encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/a...

usafacts.org/articles/wha...

“In the late 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was working on her Ph.D. at Yale, when a comment from one of her male professors puzzled her. Who, she had asked, were the women in science? There were none, he said. Another professor mumbled something about Marie Curie being the exception.”🙃

Academia still hates women. But we resist! Solidarity with all women in academia who face everyday sexism, erasure, harassment etc. and with all who were pushed out 💔❤️

A kitchen table and chair. There is a tabby gray cat loafing on the table and a solid gray cat loafing on the chair and looking at the camera

My double decker weirdos 🦭🍞

A kitchen table and chair. There is a tabby gray cat loafing on the table and a solid gray cat loafing on the chair and looking at the camera

My double decker weirdos 🦭🍞

All those little voices add up to a ROAR!!!

Screenshot from a Tumblr post by ralfmaximus: Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference. Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false: If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false. Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out

Hey Firefox users.

Goodness, if the President has a serious health problem I certainly hope he follows the expert medical advice of his Secretary of Health and Human Services

he'll always be dead in our hearts