Tootfinder

Trump selling off America to Putin because of course he is.
✅ Trump reportedly offering Putin natural resources off Alaska sparks fury
https://www.newsweek.com/alaska-russia-trump-resources-2113295

Trump Reportedly Offering Putin Natural Resources Off Alaska Sparks Fury
"Lets see Republicans defend this," former GOP Representative Adam Kinzinger wrote on X.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Friday it is
eliminating its research and development arm
and reducing agency staff by thousands of employees.
One union leader said the moves “will devastate public health in our country”.
https://www.

Perpetua Resources gets final federal permit for Stibnite #Gold project in Idaho | mining.com | #geology #antimony

Perpetua Resources gets final federal permit for Stibnite Gold project in Idaho 
The decision comes after eight years of rigorous inter-agency federal permitting, and was the last federal permit required to progress towards construction. 

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

Ring reinstated its mission to "make neighborhoods safer" and reintroduced video sharing with police in April, as its founder led an overhaul since his return (Eugene Kim/Business Insider)
https://africa.businessinsider.com/new…

Amazon now requires staff to show AI use to get promoted at Ring and some other units
To get ahead at Ring and other Amazon smart-home businesses, youll need to show your AI chops

#DH2025 thanks @flochiff.bsky.social for sharing this link as I wanted to follow up on Pandore! 'Pandore: automating text-processing workflows for humanities researchers' from Sorbonne Université and ObTIC - Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus

EPA eliminates research and development office, begins layoffs (Matthew Daly/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/epa-zeldin-trump-reorganization-science-research-acf0ad3a649f940e138b2a917169405f
http://www.memeorandum.com/250718/p143#a250718p143

Mistral adds new features to its Le Chat chatbot, including a new "deep research" mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/17/mistrals-…

Mistral's Le Chat chatbot gets a productivity push with new ‘deep research' mode | TechCrunch
French AI lab Mistral introduced a range of new features to its Le Chat chatbot on Thursday that bring it closer to the capabilities of rivals like OpenAI and Google. The new update includes a new “deep research” mode, native multilingual reasoning, and advanced image editing. 

RFK Jr.'s Dangerous Attack on mRNA Research (Jeff Coller/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/rfk-jr-s-dangerous-attack-on-mrna-research-27bc5adc
http://www.memeorandum.com/250819/p70#a250819p70