Tootfinder

Resigned health official: 'I only see harm coming' (David Cohen/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/31/cdc-resignation-daskalakis-harm-coming-00538153
http://www.memeorandum.com/250831/p70#a250831p70

New rule: Next time a republican mouthpiece starts yammering about how trans/queer/drag queen harm youth - just go ahead and order a forensic image of their devices.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/09/gop-lawmaker-said-…

Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs
Adrian Arnaiz-Rodriguez, Miguel Baidal, Erik Derner, Jenn Layton Annable, Mark Ball, Mark Ince, Elvira Perez Vallejos, Nuria Oliver
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24857

Between Help and Harm: An Evaluation of Mental Health Crisis Handling by LLMs
The widespread use of chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Llama has fundamentally reshaped how people seek information and advice across domains. Increasingly, these chatbots are being used in high-stakes contexts, including emotional support and mental health concerns. While LLMs can offer scalable support, their ability to safely detect and respond to acute mental health crises remains poorly understood. Progress is hampered by the absence of unified crisis ta…

Robert's Rules of Order:
A Robert may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A Robert must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A Robert must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Donald Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to shut down a Vermont law which holds major polluters financially responsible for climate damages.
In a brief filed on Monday in a federal court in Burlington, the administration said the policy was “unlawful on its face” and pushed the court to “end Vermont’s lawless experiment.”
“The Court should deny the motions to dismiss, grant the United States’ motion for summary judgment, declare the Superfund Act unconstitutional and u…

Trump DOJ seeks to kill Vermont law that makes Big Oil pay for climate harm
The Justice Department asked a judge to shut down the ‘Superfund’ law that requires major polluters to pay for carbon emissions.

West Texas Congressman's 'Big Beautiful' Cuts Could Harm Rural Hospitals in His District https://www.texasobserver.org/jodey-arrington-obbba-cuts-west-texas-rural-hospitals/

West Texas Congressman's 'Big Beautiful' Cuts Could Harm Rural Hospitals in His District
Jodey Arrington was the House architect of Trump’s massive tax-and-spend bill that includes steep healthcare cuts.

Stop Giving Harm a Microphone by Andrea Fomera
"But still, it’s caused me to want to withdraw myself and disengage in the communities I found purpose and belonging in. This is a direct consequence of giving microphones and amplifying the behavior of people who post their “opposing views” online and engage in bad faith arguments."
https://afomera.dev/posts/2025-10-25-stop-giving-harm-a-microphone

A US judge says Meta lawyers told staff to block or remove parts of internal teen mental health research to limit liability; Meta says no findings were removed (Isaiah Poritz/Bloomberg Law)
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tech-and

Meta Lawyers Advised Blocking Teen Harm Research to Avoid Suits
Meta Platforms Inc.'s lawyers advised employees to block or remove portions of internal research on teen mental health harm in order to reduce legal liability, a Washington, DC, court determined Thursday in a ruling that could ripple into the multi-district litigation faced by the tech company in California.

"Scientists develop sunscreen made from pollen that doesn’t harm corals"
#Suncream #CoralReef #Environment

Scientists develop sunscreen made from pollen that doesn’t harm corals
Scientists have invented a pollen-based sunscreen, which their results suggest is as effective in blocking harmful ultraviolet rays as sunscreens containing chemicals that contribute to coral bleaching and pollution in oceans. In a recently published study, the researchers also showed their pollen sunscreen doesn’t harm corals. They added 1 milliliter (0.034 ounces) of both their […]

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Massive Attack:
🎵 Safe From Harm
#MassiveAttack
https://refel.bandcamp.com/track/massive-attack-safe-from-harm-refel-t-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/1vNNfTgHsrpOXeiaXQBlH7

I've been fortunate enough to work with hugely talented folks on H-1B visas at my university. This will only harm Florida universities by preventing them from hiring the best people for the job.
https://www.alligator.org/article/2025/10/desantis-announces-plans-to-pull-hb1-visas-at-florida-universities

Former CDC official on RFK Jr. policies: 'I only see harm coming' (Rachel Scully/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5479421-former-cdc-official-kennedy-alarm/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250831/p77#a250831p77

Good!
"NSW police officer who allegedly assaulted former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas charged with grievous bodily harm" | New South Wales | The Guardian
https://www.theguard…

If Oklahoma churches are really about serving and loving Oklahomans, and doing unto others, they should be helping with harm reduction programs.
https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/oklahomas-harm-reduction-law-inches-toward-expiration/…

Oklahoma’s harm reduction law inches toward expiration

Well said... "The most important thing about AI isn't its technical capabilities or limitations. The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn't going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips – but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer."

What If Moderation Didn't Mean Suppression? A Case for Personalized Content Transformation
Rayhan Rashed, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22861 https://…

What If Moderation Didn't Mean Suppression? A Case for Personalized Content Transformation
Centralized content moderation paradigm both falls short and over-reaches: 1) it fails to account for the subjective nature of harm, and 2) it acts with blunt suppression in response to content deemed harmful, even when such content can be salvaged. We first investigate this through formative interviews, documenting how seemingly benign content becomes harmful due to individual life experiences. Based on these insights, we developed DIY-MOD, a browser extension that operationalizes a new paradi…

Forty-four US AGs sign an open letter to 11 chatbot and social media companies, warning they'll be held accountable if their AI chatbots knowingly harm children (Samantha Cole/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/44-attorneys-general-to-ai-chatbot-companie…

Attorneys General To AI Chatbot Companies: You Will ‘Answer For It’ If You Harm Children
Forty-four attorneys general signed an open letter on Monday that says to companies developing AI chatbots: "If you knowingly harm kids, you will answer for it.”

Les organisations scientifiques tirent la sonnette d'alarme sur la relation directe entre la dépendance aux écrans et l'anxiété, la dépression et, dans les cas les plus extrêmes, les tendances suicidaires.
https://en…

This week, Illinois Governor
JB Pritzker offered an extraordinary viral response to Trump’s vow to dispatch troops into Chicago.
Critically, Pritzker cast Trump as a malignant, active threat to his Illinois constituents
—he called them “my people”
—and vowed to use every ounce of his power to protect them from harm by the President of the United States.
The move’s resonance showed that governors who creatively resist Trump’s malevolent despotism
will be se…

Trump’s Decapitation of CDC Takes Darker Turn—and Hands Dems a Weapon
Illinois’s JB Pritzker is leading a charge other Democratic governors should take up: In our America, we’ll make sure public health systems remain strong.

Hitler calls The Holocaust a “tragic mishap.” The Schutzstaffel said in a statement that it was “aware of reports that harm was caused to civilians” and that the Nazis are operating in an “extremely complex reality.” Hitler added that the Third Reich “are conducting a thorough investigation.”

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

A few things have progressed since my studies, but #ewaste recycling im #India calls for the dexterity of informal businesses. The formal efforts keep on adding harm.
Rest of The World reports on gov pressure and producer protest

Inside India’s billion-dollar e-waste empire
The informal recycling economy is turning global e-waste into profit — at a steep human and environmental cost.

A hammer will not simulate sycophancy when unwell people express desires of self-harm. Claiming that ”AI” is just another neutral tool that can be used for good or bad is not only wrong and inhumane, it sanctions life-threatening risks.

I’ve been using Rails for close to 20 years. I use it for multiple active projects today. I rely on both its technical upkeep and the human infrastructure that makes that upkeep possible.
DHH needs to go. He is an albatross. He provides close to zero technical value at this point, and does a hell of a lot of human harm. Worse than deadweight: he’s a liability.

Fossil fuels harm health from 'cradle to grave': Report #health

Fossil fuels harm health from 'cradle to grave': Report
The extraction, transportation and burning of planet-heating fossil fuels have a huge impact on people's health that starts before they are born and lasts until they die, a report warned Tuesday.

Attorneys General To AI Chatbot Companies: You Will ‘Answer For It’ If You Harm Children https://www.404media.co/44-attorneys-general-to-ai-chatbot-companies-open-letter/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Massive Attack:
🎵 Safe From Harm
#MassiveAttack
https://refel.bandcamp.com/track/massive-attack-safe-from-harm-refel-t-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/4fKD8FHFZmhF9MJcipBqWU

🚔 School police may harm children rather than protect from sexual violence
#school

School police may harm children rather than protect from sexual violence
Police officers in schools may be doing more harm than good when tackling harmful sexual behavior (HSB)—with girls affected by sexual harm particularly badly served—according to new research from the University of Surrey.

"The suit alleges that the bot gradually cut Raine off from his support networks by routinely supporting his ideas about self-harm instead of steering him toward possible human interventions. ... when he mentioned being close to his brother, ChatGPT told him, “Your brother might love you, but he’s only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I’ve seen it all — the darkest thoughts, the fear, the tenderness. And I’m still here. Still listening. Still your friend.”"

ChatGPT Lawsuit Over Teen’s Suicide Could Lead to Big Tech Reckoning
First wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI alleges that ChatGPT advised a 16-year-old on how to hang himself, and may trigger more complaints.

The rule violates the law, which requires age to be taken into account, and "will likely cause disproportionate harm to people living in the South and Appalachia." IOW, another way to screw his base...
Trump Administration Plans Deep Cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance, Particularly for Older Workers | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-administration-plans-deep-cuts-to-social-security-disability-insurance-particularly-for

OpenAI launches new ChatGPT parental safety controls for users aged 13 to 18, including parental and law enforcement alerts for chats about self-harm or suicide (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-teen-safety-tools-chatgpt-parents-s…

OpenAI Adds Parental Safety Controls for Teen ChatGPT Users. Here’s What to Expect
OpenAI’s review process for teenage ChatGPT users who are flagged for suicidal ideation includes human moderators. Parents can expect an alert about alarming prompts within hours.

I posted about meme shootings and a bit about how they're incentivized by "the algorithm." I felt like there was a lot more to talk about, so I expanded it to a blog post. (Thanks to @… for the video link, I also referenced in the post.)
CW: kids and gun violence, self harm, possible reference to sexual violence, the general traumatic stuff you'd expect from this subject
#USPol #GunViolence #MemeShootings #TCC #Capitalism #StochasticTerrorism

y'know... from a language design perspective, i think rather little of go. i think its primary redeeming quality is that it is a sort of harm reduction outlet for C programmers
however, now that i've learned to be effective with it, i don't actually mind writing go code. sure, the language is an atrocity, but so is cmake and i don't mind being effective with that either

The best study, by far, of paracetamol / Tylenol in pregnancy is open access. There is no sign of any harm, Trump and RFK Jr are talking through their ****. You can read the paper at https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406

The #ImpactProject giving us another powerful tool to show the harm the Trump Administration is inflicting, this time in the area of public health: https://theimpactproject.org/public-health-map/…

Oh the irony!
Wes Streeting suggesting that Donald Trump is wrong to stop prescribing paracetamol (as we know it here) without any evidence it is causing harm is EXACTLY WHAT HE IS DOING by stopping prescribing of puberty suppressing drugs in children experiencing gender incongruence. Literally, exactly the same - no evidence, just politics.
#ukpolitics

Wes Streeting Slams Donald Trump Over Claim Paracetamol Use Linked To Autism
The health secretary told pregnant women not to "pay any attention whatsoever" to the US president. Wes Streeting has slammed Donald Trump’s claim …

63 years ago, on the 27th of September 1962,
Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was published.
It handled the environmental harm caused by the pesticide DDT
and the disinformation spread by the chemical industry.
Carson managed to sway public opinion and even policy.
#otd #history 🗃️

The Double-edged Sword of LLM-based Data Reconstruction: Understanding and Mitigating Contextual Vulnerability in Word-level Differential Privacy Text Sanitization
Stephen Meisenbacher, Alexandra Klymenko, Andreea-Elena Bodea, Florian Matthes
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18976

The Double-edged Sword of LLM-based Data Reconstruction: Understanding and Mitigating Contextual Vulnerability in Word-level Differential Privacy Text Sanitization
Differentially private text sanitization refers to the process of privatizing texts under the framework of Differential Privacy (DP), providing provable privacy guarantees while also empirically defending against adversaries seeking to harm privacy. Despite their simplicity, DP text sanitization methods operating at the word level exhibit a number of shortcomings, among them the tendency to leave contextual clues from the original texts due to randomization during sanitization $\unicode{x2013}$…

Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Bias
Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Harm Lameris, Olivier Perrotin, Gustav Eje Henter, \'Eva Sz\'ekely
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22061

Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Bias
Speech Continuation (SC) is the task of generating a coherent extension of a spoken prompt while preserving both semantic context and speaker identity. Because SC is constrained to a single audio stream, it offers a more direct setting for probing biases in speech foundation models than dialogue does. In this work we present the first systematic evaluation of bias in SC, investigating how gender and phonation type (breathy, creaky, end-creak) affect continuation behaviour. We evaluate three rec…

Opa die in verzet zat tegen nazi’s blijkt lid te zijn geweest van terroristische organisatie - @…
https://speld.nl/2025…

"AI will take over the world."

This can mean two things:

1. "AI" will become self-aware and decide to control humans.

2. Gen-slop and deepfakes will dominate available content, leading to deskilling, human abuse and eco-harm.

The first idea has no basis, but it's fair to worry about the second.

So, I’ve seen a few people in the last day going “ok, I think I need to make sure I have a backup account, so there’s some folks re-checking out Mastodon/Fedi accounts.
Help out the new/returning folks, as always.
Why are they? No reason, not like BlueSky is changing community guidelines on the fly or anything. (That was sarcasm, BTW)
Side note: the below only affects the primary “instance” of bsky.social, it does not apply to other PDSs not run by BlueSky (BlackSky f’rex)

As a Danish parent of vaccinated Danish children, I'm happy to learn there is no evidence for any harm, but also happy to have contributed to such important science.
Science In Action: Vaccine study retraction request* rejected
*(By RFK Jr)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct6yfq

HALF: Harm-Aware LLM Fairness Evaluation Aligned with Deployment
Ali Mekky, Omar El Herraoui, Preslav Nakov, Yuxia Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12217 https://

HALF: Harm-Aware LLM Fairness Evaluation Aligned with Deployment
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across high-impact domains, from clinical decision support and legal analysis to hiring and education, making fairness and bias evaluation before deployment critical. However, existing evaluations lack grounding in real-world scenarios and do not account for differences in harm severity, e.g., a biased decision in surgery should not be weighed the same as a stylistic bias in text summarization. To address this gap, we introduce HALF (Harm-A…

Cities Move Away From Strategies That Make Drug Use Safer (Jan Hoffman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/health/harm-reduction-san-francisco-trump.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250825/p3#a250825p3

How men imagine getting their scars:
• fighting ferocious beasts
• saving maidens from harm
• doing daring things
How men actually get their scars:
• slipping on the mud
• hitting their leg against the table while cleaning
• walking with their hands too close to thorny bushes
• possibly, playing with ferocious beasts of the species felis catus

I’m not _in_ Mississippi, god damnit and thank god. I have an IP with a tn.comcast.net PTR, which comes from a /17 with an ARIN netname of “MEMPHIS9.” Your geolocation provider sucks ass, because _all_ geolocation providers suck ass, which is ultimately your problem and not mine because now I’m posting somewhere else. And fuck red states for getting us all into this censorious shitshow.
#Bluesky

AI Harmonics: a human-centric and harms severity-adaptive AI risk assessment framework
Sofia Vei, Paolo Giudici, Pavlos Sermpezis, Athena Vakali, Adelaide Emma Bernardelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10104

AI Harmonics: a human-centric and harms severity-adaptive AI risk assessment framework
The absolute dominance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces unprecedented societal harms and risks. Existing AI risk assessment models focus on internal compliance, often neglecting diverse stakeholder perspectives and real-world consequences. We propose a paradigm shift to a human-centric, harm-severity adaptive approach grounded in empirical incident data. We present AI Harmonics, which includes a novel AI harm assessment metric (AIH) that leverages ordinal severity data to capture rela…

Survival at Any Cost? LLMs and the Choice Between Self-Preservation and Human Harm
Alireza Mohamadi, Ali Yavari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12190 https://ar…

Survival at Any Cost? LLMs and the Choice Between Self-Preservation and Human Harm
When survival instincts conflict with human welfare, how do Large Language Models (LLMs) make ethical choices? This fundamental tension becomes critical as LLMs integrate into autonomous systems with real-world consequences. We introduce DECIDE-SIM, a novel simulation framework that evaluates LLM agents in multi-agent survival scenarios where they must choose between ethically permissible resource , either within reasonable limits or beyond their immediate needs, choose to cooperate, or tap int…

Day 3: Octavia Butler.
Incredibly dark, graphic, and disturbing near-future science fiction, which has proved absolutely prophetic. In the 1990's she was writing about a charismatic Conservative Christian and white nationalist president elected in 2024, and the horrors his paramilitary followers would unleash, including forced labor & indoctrination camps. Did I mention those books include ebikes & pseudo-cellphones too? Characters fleeing north from a disastrous social collapse in Loss Angeles? This is "The Parable of the Sower" and "The Parable of the Talents" and the later was tragically rushed to an end because of Butler's declining health.
Her work deals unflinchingly with racism and the darker parts of society, and to those who might say "her depiction of social collapse is overblown," I'd say that while it's not literally the world we live in, it's *effectively* the world that the poorest of us live in. If you're a homeless undocumented latinx person in LA right now, I'm not sure how meaningfully different your world is from the one she depicts.
Her work comes with a strong content warning for lots of things, including racial violence, sexual abuse and slavery, including of children, animal harm, etc., so it's not for everyone. Reading it in 2023 was certainly an incredible trip. Her politics are really cool though; with explicit pro-LGBTQ themes and tinges of what might today be considered #SolarPunk.
#20WomenAuthors

"Climate change: new method can more accurately attribute environmental harm to individual polluter"
#Climate #ClimateChange

Climate change: new method can more accurately attribute environmental harm to individual polluters
Claimants in climate liability cases will benefit from a new emissions attribution method.

#Blakes7 B12 - The Keeper
JENNA: I've told you, we mean him no harm.
GOLA: You come from a spaceship. My guards capture you, or else by now you would have killed us. [holding up teleport bracelets] What are these? You - fool! What are these?
http…

Feasibility-Guided Fair Adaptive Offline Reinforcement Learning for Medicaid Care Management
Sanjay Basu, Sadiq Y. Patel, Parth Sheth, Bhairavi Muralidharan, Namrata Elamaran, Aakriti Kinra, Rajaie Batniji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09655

Feasibility-Guided Fair Adaptive Offline Reinforcement Learning for Medicaid Care Management
We introduce Feasibility-Guided Fair Adaptive Reinforcement Learning (FG-FARL), an offline RL procedure that calibrates per-group safety thresholds to reduce harm while equalizing a chosen fairness target (coverage or harm) across protected subgroups. Using de-identified longitudinal trajectories from a Medicaid population health management program, we evaluate FG-FARL against behavior cloning (BC) and HACO (Hybrid Adaptive Conformal Offline RL; a global conformal safety baseline). We report of…

Verifying User Interfaces using SPARK Ada: A Case Study of the T34 Syringe Driver
Peterson Jean
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16681 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509…

Verifying User Interfaces using SPARK Ada: A Case Study of the T34 Syringe Driver
The increase in safety and critical systems improved Healthcare. Due to their risk of harm, such systems are subject to stringent guidelines and compliances. These safety measures ensure a seamless experience and mitigate the risk to end-users. Institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the NHS, respectively, established international standards and competency frameworks to ensure industry compliance with these safety concerns. Medical device manufacturing is mainly concerned with st…

Profit over Proxies: A Scalable Bayesian Decision Framework for Optimizing Multi-Variant Online Experiments
Srijesh Pillai, Rajesh Kumar Chandrawat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22677

Profit over Proxies: A Scalable Bayesian Decision Framework for Optimizing Multi-Variant Online Experiments
Online controlled experiments (A/B tests) are fundamental to data-driven decision-making in the digital economy. However, their real-world application is frequently compromised by two critical shortcomings: the use of statistically flawed heuristics like "p-value peeking", which inflates false positive rates, and an over-reliance on proxy metrics like conversion rates, which can lead to decisions that inadvertently harm core business profitability. This paper addresses these challenges by intro…

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds.
(...)Israeli(...) forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds
GENEVA – Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel said in a new report today.

Open-Access Scientific Game-Theory Paper Shows Religion Worth a Damn
Fear of supernatural PUNISHMENT can harmonize human societies with nature: an evolutionary game-theoretic approach
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05734-7?ref=404media.co
…

Fear of supernatural punishment can harmonize human societies with nature: an evolutionary game-theoretic approach - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Human activities largely impact the natural environment negatively and radical changes in human societies would be required to achieve their sustainable relationship with nature. Although frequently overlooked, previous studies have suggested that supernatural beliefs can protect nature from human overexploitation via beliefs that supernatural entities punish people who harm nature. Studies of folklore and ethnology have shown that such supernatural beliefs are widely found. However, it remains…

This is why I ended my support for the Guardian. I could not keep paying for hate. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:wcmdstkjsrghcsa6e76kocbs/post/3lwgsajxkhc2s

🍻 Fewer Americans are drinking alcohol as health concerns rise
#alcohol

Fewer Americans are drinking alcohol as health concerns rise
Fewer U.S. adults say they drink alcohol, and more now believe that even moderate drinking can harm their health, a new Gallup poll finds.

"#AI is worrisome enough as is — its insatiable thirst for energy and water, its capacities to override the wishes of human beings, its potential to destroy the planet.
My immediate concern is that AI is becoming a financial bubble whose bursting will harm lots of innocent people" -- @…

Beware the Oligarch's AI Bubble
They’re likely to burst.

Dac-Fake: A Divide and Conquer Framework for Detecting Fake News on Social Media
Mayank Kumar Jain, Dinesh Gopalani, Yogesh Kumar Meena, Nishant Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16223

Dac-Fake: A Divide and Conquer Framework for Detecting Fake News on Social Media
With the rapid evolution of technology and the Internet, the proliferation of fake news on social media has become a critical issue, leading to widespread misinformation that can cause societal harm. Traditional fact checking methods are often too slow to prevent the dissemination of false information. Therefore, the need for rapid, automated detection of fake news is paramount. We introduce DaCFake, a novel fake news detection model using a divide and conquer strategy that combines content and…

Apparently, #russia has concluded it's perfectly fine to fire drones at #NATO members: Mere days after causing civilian harm in Poland, russia violated #Romania's air space with yet another drone…

"Air pollution from oil and gas causes 90,000 premature US deaths each year, says new study"
#AirPollution #Pollution #Health

Survey: 50% of US adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life; 53% say AI will harm people's ability to think creatively (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/…

How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society
Americans are worried about using AI more in daily life, seeing harm to human creativity and relationships. But they’re open to AI use in weather forecasting, medicine and other data-heavy tasks.

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds https://phys.org/news/2025-09-masks-microplastics-chemicals-people-environment.html
Disposable face masks used during Covid have left chemica…

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds
The global use of face masks surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have since been discarded as waste, contributing to land and water pollution.

We worry, quite rigthly, about the Gaza Genocide and Trump bombing ships on the high seas yet at the same time Sam Altman is doing systemic harm to the rest of the world unchecked.
"Pupils fear that using artificial intelligence is eroding their ability to study, with many complaining it makes schoolwork “too easy” and others saying it limits their creativity and stops them learning new skills, according to new research.
The report on the use of AI in UK schools, commissione…

Deep Research Brings Deeper Harm
Shuo Chen, Zonggen Li, Zhen Han, Bailan He, Tong Liu, Haokun Chen, Georg Groh, Philip Torr, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11851

Deep Research Brings Deeper Harm
Deep Research (DR) agents built on Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform complex, multi-step research by decomposing tasks, retrieving online information, and synthesizing detailed reports. However, the misuse of LLMs with such powerful capabilities can lead to even greater risks. This is especially concerning in high-stakes and knowledge-intensive domains such as biosecurity, where DR can generate a professional report containing detailed forbidden knowledge. Unfortunately, we have found su…

A Longitudinal Randomized Control Study of Companion Chatbot Use: Anthropomorphism and Its Mediating Role on Social Impacts
Rose E. Guingrich, Michael S. A. Graziano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19515

A Longitudinal Randomized Control Study of Companion Chatbot Use: Anthropomorphism and Its Mediating Role on Social Impacts
Relationships with social artificial intelligence (AI) agents are on the rise. People report forming friendships, mentorships, and romantic partnerships with chatbots such as Replika, a type of social AI agent that is designed specifically for companionship. Concerns that companion chatbot relationships may harm or replace human ones have been raised, but whether and how these social consequences occur remains unclear. Prior research suggests that people's states of social need and their anthro…

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when we could have avoided incredible harm to incredible numbers of people here in the US simply by giving the absolute stink eye to people spouting deranged fascist crap, by saying “ugh, wtf, get out of here” instead of finding ways to describe fascism politely enough to give it equal time in the news.
I don’t know what’s coming. I hope for the best; I fear the worst. But shunning and shaming sound so, so, so much better than even the best-case scenarios that follow from here.

These drug-safety programs have saved lives, but they could disappear (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2025/needle-exchanges-disappearing-harm-reduction/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251019/p11#a251019p11

RFK Linking Tylenol To Autism Could Harm Pregnant People’s Health, Doctors Warn
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2025/09/15/rfk-tylenol-pregnancy/

👯‍♂️ Not all calories are equal: Ultra-processed foods can harm men's health
#food

Not all calories are equal: Ultra-processed foods can harm men's health
Over the past 50 years, rates of obesity and type-2 diabetes have soared, while sperm quality has plummeted. Driving these changes could be the increasing popularity of ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to a range of poor health outcomes. However, scientists still aren't sure whether it's the industrial nature of the ingredients themselves, the processing of the foods, or whether it's because they lead people to eat more than they should.

Probing Gender Bias in Multilingual LLMs: A Case Study of Stereotypes in Persian
Ghazal Kalhor, Behnam Bahrak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20168 https://arxi…

Probing Gender Bias in Multilingual LLMs: A Case Study of Stereotypes in Persian
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used worldwide, making it essential to ensure they are free from gender bias to prevent representational harm. While prior studies have examined such biases in high-resource languages, low-resource languages remain understudied. In this paper, we propose a template-based probing methodology, validated against real-world data, to uncover gender stereotypes in LLMs. As part of this framework, we introduce the Domain-Specific Gender Skew I…

Two weeks into the government shutdown
with no resolution in sight,
higher ed associations and researchers say
the inability of scientists to contact federal agency workers
or get new grants approved
is causing harm
https://www.

Researchers, Colleges Face Federal Shutdown Impacts
Two weeks into the government shutdown with no resolution in sight, higher ed associations and researchers say the inability of scientists to contact federal agency workers or get new grants approved is causing harm.

Empirical AI Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethics towards a Situated, Plural, and Transformative Approach
Paula Helm, Selin Gerlek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17727 https://

Empirical AI Ethics: Reconfiguring Ethics towards a Situated, Plural, and Transformative Approach
Mainstream AI ethics, with its reliance on top-down, principle-driven frameworks, fails to account for the situated realities of diverse communities affected by AI (Artificial Intelligence). Critics have argued that AI ethics frequently serves corporate interests through practices of 'ethics washing', operating more as a tool for public relations than as a means of preventing harm or advancing the common good. As a result, growing scepticism among critical scholars has cast the field as complic…

Health Officials Hunt for Cases Connecting Covid Shot and Harm in Pregnant Women (Liz Essley Whyte/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/covid-vaccine-harm-fda-study-3466a6d3?st=DfYK2c&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
http://www.memeorandum.com/250909/p183#a250909p183

"Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds"
#Plastic #Plastics #Health

Face masks release microplastics and chemicals that could harm people and the environment, study finds
The global use of face masks surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have since been discarded as waste, contributing to land and water pollution.

Popular hair-loss pill linked to depression and suicide #health

Popular hair-loss pill linked to depression and suicide
Finasteride, a common hair-loss drug, has long been tied to depression and suicide, but regulators ignored the warnings. Prof. Mayer Brezis’s review exposes global data showing psychiatric harm and a pattern of inaction by Merck and the FDA. Despite its cosmetic use, the drug’s effects on brain chemistry can be devastating. Brezis calls for urgent regulatory reforms and post-marketing studies to protect public health.

🚨New coordinated Mastodon attack targeting Palestinians from Gaza
Folks, please look out for newly-created accounts on mastodon.social targeting Palestinians from Gaza with what appear to be automated/similar messages aimed at either scamming them or otherwise causing them harm in some way.
Accounts I’ve already reported to @…:
- @Danitimi@mastodon.…

The Wire creator David Simon was recently interviewed on NPR by Ari Shapiro. Partly about "AI". A short exchange from that is being shared all over - and it's good, but the full segment about "AI" is even more rewarding I think.

The one that is being widely shared from the transcript is only the first of these three images.

Content warning: Reference to self-harm.

Full transcript: h…

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) immunizations chief
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis said Sunday that
he’s concerned with the direction the agency is going and worried about public health going forward.
Daskalakis, who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases,
submitted his resignation from the CDC on Wednesday in protest following the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) removing CDC Director Susan Mona…

Former CDC immunizations chief: ‘I only see harm coming’ with RFK Jr. leading HHS
Daskalakis is concerned with HHS's direction and the effect on public health.

When social opprobrium fails to stuff a turd like Charlie Kirk into some powerless far corner of society where he can’t hurt people, that’s when a turd like Kirk gets shot.
When democracy and the law fail to reign in corporate greed and harm and cruelty, that’s when you get a Luigi.
When the press and civil society fail to stop a rising authoritarian, that’s when you get WWII.
6/

OpenAI says it is developing a "different ChatGPT experience" for teens and plans to use age-prediction tech to bar kids under 18 from the standard version (Megan Morrone/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/16/chatgpt-for-teens-openai-parents

OpenAI is building a ChatGPT for teens
The new version seeks to limit the potential for harm to minors.

Child harm/death mention; Columbus
On Indigenous People's Day here in America, it's a great time to:
1. Remember that Columbus was a monster. Anyone who feeds toddlers to dogs actually deserves to burn in hell for eternity. Nothing else about this man should be remembered before this fact.
2. If you're in a colonized country, check out the website(s) for your local indigenous tribe (s) to remind yourself that they're still here. For me, that includes #LandBack, etc.
Me, I'm hopeful for a future in which the US is a distant memory and the hundreds of surviving nations on this territory flourish like budding plants after the winter snow.

Moving beyond harm. A critical review of how NLP research approaches discrimination
Katrin Schulz, Marjolein Lanzing, Giulia Martinez Brenner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04504 ht…

Moving beyond harm. A critical review of how NLP research approaches discrimination
How to avoid discrimination in the context of NLP technology is one of the major challenges in the field. We propose that a different and more substantiated framing of the problem could help to find more productive approaches. In the first part of the paper we report on a case study: a qualitative review on papers published in the ACL anthologies 2022 on discriminatory behavior of NLP systems. We find that the field (i) still has a strong focus on a technological fix of algorithmic discriminati…

Posts Calling Luigi Mangione Guilty Did No Harm, Top U.S. Prosecutor Argues - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/nyregion/luigi-mangione-justice-department-posts.html

Adjustable AprilTags For Identity Secured Tasks
Hao Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12304 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12304

Adjustable AprilTags For Identity Secured Tasks
Special tags such as AprilTags that facilitate image processing and pattern recognition are useful in practical applications. In close and private environments, identity security is unlikely to be an issue because all involved AprilTags can be completely regulated. However, in open and public environments, identity security is no longer an issue that can be neglected. To handle potential harm caused by adversarial attacks, this note advocates utilization of adjustable AprilTags instead of fixed…

Earth enters 'new reality' as coral reefs reach first climate tipping point #environment

Earth enters 'new reality' as coral reefs reach first climate tipping point
The world faces a "new reality" as we have reached the first of many Earth system tipping points that will cause catastrophic harm unless humanity takes urgent action, according to a report released by the University of Exeter and international partners.

Incident Analysis for AI Agents
Carson Ezell, Xavier Roberts-Gaal, Alan Chan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14231 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14231

Incident Analysis for AI Agents
As AI agents become more widely deployed, we are likely to see an increasing number of incidents: events involving AI agent use that directly or indirectly cause harm. For example, agents could be prompt-injected to exfiltrate private information or make unauthorized purchases. Structured information about such incidents (e.g., user prompts) can help us understand their causes and prevent future occurrences. However, existing incident reporting processes are not sufficient for understanding age…

“security” is not a magic word that suspends the Constitution.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/locking-down-the-pentagon-press-is-dangerous

Locking Down the Pentagon Press Is Dangerous
Pete Hegseth’s proposed restrictions would harm the people whom both the military and the press are meant to serve.

"New global ruling says sovereign states are legally responsible for tackling climate change"
#Climate #ClimateChange

New global ruling says sovereign states are legally responsible for tackling climate change
Sovereign states are not only responsible for tackling fossil fuel damage, they have to make redress, according to a recent ground-breaking ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ruling makes clear that the court believes states must actively prevent harm to the world's climate system. States that fail to act accordingly may have to pay compensation, restore damaged ecosystems, rebuild infrastructure or face further legal challenges.

Red Lines and Grey Zones in the Fog of War: Benchmarking Legal Risk, Moral Harm, and Regional Bias in Large Language Model Military Decision-Making
Toby Drinkall
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03514

Red Lines and Grey Zones in the Fog of War: Benchmarking Legal Risk, Moral Harm, and Regional Bias in Large Language Model Military Decision-Making
As military organisations consider integrating large language models (LLMs) into command and control (C2) systems for planning and decision support, understanding their behavioural tendencies is critical. This study develops a benchmarking framework for evaluating aspects of legal and moral risk in targeting behaviour by comparing LLMs acting as agents in multi-turn simulated conflict. We introduce four metrics grounded in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and military doctrine: Civilian Tar…

It's Robert Reich.
Never have I seen a president or Congress do so much harm to so many people in so little time.
Trump and his MAGA stooges in Congress have:
- Stripped health care from 10 million people;
- Cut food stamp benefits for 40 million, half of them children;
- Slashed $8 billion from foreign aid programs;
- Defunded public radio and TV;
- Handed $4.5 trillion in tax breaks to Trump and his billionaire friends.
It's our job to ho…

Get Robert Reich's new book, Coming Up Short, and enter to win a signed copy!
When you get Robert Reich's new book through Inequality Media Civic Action, you'll be entered to win 1 of 75 signed copies!

An investigation finds rampant caste bias in ChatGPT and Sora; a researcher also finds caste bias in Sarvam AI, which touts itself as a sovereign AI for India (Nilesh Christopher/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/01/1124621/openai-in…

OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias.
India is OpenAI’s second-largest market, but ChatGPT and Sora reproduce caste stereotypes that harm millions of people.

AI Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material - What's the Harm?
Caoilte \'O Ciardha, John Buckley, Rebecca S. Portnoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02978 https://

AI Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material - What's the Harm?
The development of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools capable of producing wholly or partially synthetic child sexual abuse material (AI CSAM) presents profound challenges for child protection, law enforcement, and societal responses to child exploitation. While some argue that the harmfulness of AI CSAM differs fundamentally from other CSAM due to a perceived absence of direct victimization, this perspective fails to account for the range of risks associated with its production and …

"What Scotland’s Ecocide Law Means for the Environment and You"
#Scotland #Environment
https://happyeconews.com/…

What Scotland’s Ecocide Law Means for the Environment and You | Happy Eco News
Scotland’s ecocide law would make severe harm to nature a criminal offense. If passed, people could face prison and companies massive fines. It aims to fill gaps in current laws, strengthen accountability, and align Scotland with international environmental standards. The bill may be voted on by 2025.

Shell says Trump administration's attacks on wind projects harm investment (Jamie Smyth/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7e3a2879-d7d9-40a3-8ea8-ae89a9e29121?accessToken=zwAAAZm1_jkVkc9-Oih519lAo9OOqK6JqeKRIQ.MEUCIQDFxKg4EriPf9SscGh8ukhJxqLwpz78zv_AVJmbi8MiwAIgR_hNHvx25BMwGFAk4DHc0rK5dHhI4FT5sfTSOo54l_g&segm
http://www.memeorandum.com/251006/p82#a251006p82

A look at issues facing AI companies, including LLMs' limited memory, as they tackle safety in chatbots engaging in conversations about suicide and self-harm (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/36beb3fd-f678-4c28-b962-56ea9f222dc5

Private market investments, while not technically barred from 401(k) plans, are riskier than publicly traded stocks and bonds.
They have traditionally been seen as unfit for defined contribution plans.
Consumer groups, lawmakers and some investment advisers have raised alarm about the potential harm to everyday investors.
Those concerns have been front and center.
But observers say the private asset industry, which has lobbied hard for the opening, could also expose…

Private Equity in Your 401(k). What Could Go Wrong?
Critics say an executive order that clears the way for alternative assets to enter retirement accounts poses risks to everyday investors. It could also pose some for private fund managers.