Bad Bot Problem
Following a report on the situation with Social Media and bots, Lewis Stuart of University of Nottingham is inspired to see just how easy it is to fire up his own botnet and puts them to work on a fake social media site: 'scroll hole.'
📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjQNDCYL5Rg

Aerial scouting was an effective, and very scenic, way to find the most intense #wildflower blooms in the Carrizo Plain and Antelope Valley
#flying

NASA is taking steps to potentially roll back the #ArtemisII rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after overnight Feb. 21 observing interrupted flow of helium to the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/02/21/nasa-troubleshooting-artemis-ii-rocket-upper-stage-issue-preparing-to-roll-back/ - the upper stage uses helium to maintain the proper environmental conditions for the stage’s engine and to pressurize liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant tanks; the systems worked during NASA’s Artemis II wet dress rehearsals, but teams were not able to properly flow helium during normal operations and reconfigurations following the wet dress rehearsal that concluded Feb. 19.

Top law firm Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-profile case contained multiple AI hallucinations (Financial Times)

Is building an LLM inherently problematic? Not necessarily, but there's no good way to do it under capitalism. Is using an local LLM funding these evil companies? No. It's not.
Spelling and grammar checking is one of the few uses of LLMs that is not based on fundamentally failing to understand what an LLM actually is. A statistical model is gonna be *really good* at flagging things that are probably typos (low probability areas). There will be false positives, which is fine if you're actually paying attention...

'No real choice at all': First Amendment group uses Trump admin's own filing against itself to demand SCOTUS overturn 'gag orders' on immigration judges | Law & Crime
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/no-real-choice-at-all-first-amendment-group-uses-trump-admins-own-filing-against-itself-to-demand-scotus-overturn-gag-orders-on-immigration-judges/

:neocat_flop:

A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.
Basel-Stadt announced the problem with its e-voting pilot, open to about 10,300 locals living abroad and 30 people with disabilities, last Friday afternoon.
It encouraged participants to deliver a paper vote to the town hall or use a polling station but admitted this would not be possible for many.
By the close of polling on Sunday, its …

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them
: Officials suspend Basel-Stadt trial and launch probe