Tootfinder

User interface pretending to be human: fraud.
Statistical sentence generation described as “intelligence”: fraud.
Telling people, often children, to commit dangerous or criminal acts: all sorts of crimes.
Scientific papers generated, non-existing cases quoted at court, homework faked, artists ripped-off: fraud and copyright infringement.
Training based on unlicensed works: copyright infringement.
Data centers with tax incentives and special energy pricing: theft.
Promises to investors of AGI: fraud.
Government bailouts with taxpayer money: theft and fraud.
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Media and politicians: This is innovation, don’t get left behind.

Bookmarked: CoMMA: thousands of medieval manuscripts finally transcribed | Inria #HTR Transcribing thousands of medieva…

CoMMA: thousands of medieval manuscripts finally transcribed | Inria
Transcribing thousands of medieval manuscripts by hand would be a monumental undertaking. Fortunately, researchers in computational humanities at the Inria Paris Centre have been able to automate the task through the use of generative AI. Their creation is CoMMA, a giant, one-of-a-kind corpus that will now be available to specialists in the humanities, revolutionising the exploration of writing from the Middle Ages.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

⇢ So, more and more research questions will be “answered” directly by chatbots, and for the rest, the results will be produced by code generated by chatbots processing data preprocessed by chatbots.
This is then complemented by a lot of speculation about the “meaning” of these results. □
#DigitalHumanities

I decided it was time for another go at explaining Special Relativity.
I remain annoyed at how few people really get it, even amongst avid SF consumers, who have gotten entirely too accustomed to generations of SF writers papering over the FTL issues with technobabble, 'cause we need that galactic empire, don'tcha know.
The idea is to do this with basic geometry you knew or could have learned about in 6th grade plus a bit of algebra (up to Pythagorean Theorem, which I *d…

Chuck Schumer remains the worst of the Democratic Party. Beholden to special interests, refusing to retire despite relying on a political playbook from former generations, and doing his best to knee-cap progressives while hoping for "bipartisanship" from Rs.
Remember when Schumer endorsed Mamdani? Yeah, neither do I, because he fucking didn't. Even Jeffries (waiting until less than 2 weeks before the election) finally endorsed the D Mayoral candidate. Not Schumer, tho!

Chuck Schumer’s Ridiculous Strategy For Trump’s Illegal War: Hope Republicans Come To Their Senses
I’ve criticized Chuck Schumer plenty over the years, generally for being bad on tech policy, but also for not understanding the moment we’re living through. Yes, he’s the leader of a minority…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ClassicalLive
- Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ‘Resurrection’ from Vienna
Elizabeth Alker introduces an afternoon of specially made recordings including Mahler's 'Resurrection’ Symphony from Vienna plus a celebration of Radio 3's New Generation Artists.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002nprp

Channel 4 reveals that the anchor who narrates and appears throughout a special titled "Will AI Take My Job?" was AI-generated, a first for British television (Ethan Shanfeld/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/ai-news-anchor-channel-4-1236557295/…

AI News Anchor Debuts on Channel 4 in British TV Stunt
An AI-generated news anchor appeared on Britain's Channel 4 in a stunt proving the dangers of artificial intelligence.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ClassicalLive
- Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ
Elizabeth Alker introduces an afternoon of specially made recordings including Berlioz's musical portrait of the young Christ and a celebration of the New Generation Artists.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002npsw