Tootfinder

Katzen irritieren Reasoning-Modelle: Studie probt Angriff
Ein irrelevanter Input verschlechtert die Ergebnisse von Reasoning-Modellen drastisch: Eine Studie hat das mit Katzen getestet.
https://www.

Wegen ukrainischen Drohnenangriffen: Russland schaltet öfter mobiles Internet ab
Der Ukraine gelingen immer wieder spektakuläre Angriffe im russischen Hinterland, Drohnen machen es möglich. Zur Gegenwehr wird oft das Mobilfunknetz gesperrt.

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

Massiver Cyberangriff auf US-Provider: Erster Einbruch schon ein Jahr früher
2024 ist mutmaßlich chinesischen Angreifern ein massiver Angriff auf US-Provider gelungen. Eine Malware wurde aber offenbar deutlich früher installiert.

$\textit{Grahak-Nyay:}$ Consumer Grievance Redressal through Large Language Models
Shrey Ganatra, Swapnil Bhattacharyya, Harshvivek Kashid, Spandan Anaokar, Shruti Nair, Reshma Sekhar, Siddharth Manohar, Rahul Hemrajani, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04854

$\textit{Grahak-Nyay:}$ Consumer Grievance Redressal through Large Language Models
Access to consumer grievance redressal in India is often hindered by procedural complexity, legal jargon, and jurisdictional challenges. To address this, we present $\textbf{Grahak-Nyay}$ (Justice-to-Consumers), a chatbot that streamlines the process using open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Grahak-Nyay simplifies legal complexities through a concise and up-to-date knowledge base. We introduce three novel datasets: $\textit{GeneralQA}$ (general con…

Wanted to find out how many calories are in poop to make a nice fat-positive post on here, but after wading through 5 separate results from the top to the bottom of the first page of results, every single one of them showed signs of AI authorship, so none of the info was trustworthy (several contradicted each other or themselves). The one article that cited legit sources didn't include a straightforward answer to the question. Of course, I could dig past the first page, or look through the cited sources do some math myself, and that's not even that hard to do. But 10 years ago, a trustworthy answer would have been among the first 5 search results. When we say #AI is destroying the digital commons, this is what we mean.
Gonna go find some academic papers to answer this and report back.

Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Cyberattacke: Angreifer öffnen Staudammventile
https://www.…

So to summarize this whole adventure:
1. A good 45 minutes was spent to get an answer that we probably could have gotten in 5 minutes in the 2010's, or in maybe 1-2 hours in the 1990's.
2. The time investment wasn't a total waste as we learned a lot along the way that we wouldn't have in the 2010's. Most relevant is the wide range of variation (e.g. a 2x factor depending on fiber intake!).
3. Most of the search engine results were confidently wrong answers that had no relation to reality. We were lucky to get one that had real citations we could start from (but that same article included the bogus 4.91 kcal/gram number). Next time I want to know a random factoid I might just start on Google scholar.
4. At least one page we chased citations through had a note at the top about being frozen due to NIH funding issues. The digital commons is under attack on multiple fronts.
All of this is yet another reason not to support the big LLM companies.
#AI

Meta plant offenbar proaktive KI-Chatbots, die ungefragt Nutzer ansprechen
Bald könnten KI-Chatbots auf die Nutzer von Messenger, WhatsApp und Instagram zugehen, um Konversationen anzuregen. Das sollen interne Dokumente zeigen.

Wer haftet bei einem Phishing-Angriff, wenn Geld auf ein falsches Konto überwiesen wird? 🤔 Das Landgerichts Rostock entschied, dass der Rechnungssteller weiterhin Anspruch auf Zahlung hat, sofern die Fälschung erkennbar war. Das Risiko liegt beim Überweisenden.
Zum Artikel: http…