Tootfinder

"Exposing Reform’s Oil Ties Significantly Reduces Party Support, New Research Finds"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #FossilFuels

Exposing Reform’s Oil Ties Significantly Reduces Party Support, New Research Finds
Reform UK’s oil industry interests are a major turn-off for voters, new research reveals. The think tank Persuasion UK tested five anti-Reform messages on 6,000 adults. According to the research, “by far the most impactful” message that dented support for Nigel Farage’s party was exposing its corporate, fossil fuel donors.  Five demographically-identical groups were shown […]

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

Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
Alexandra Olteanu, Su Lin Blodgett, Agathe Balayn, Angelina Wang, Fernando Diaz, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Margaret Mitchell, Michael Ekstrand, Reuben Binns, Solon Barocas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14652

Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor -- such as whether mathematical, statistical, or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI community, including overblown claims about AI capabilities. Our position is that a broader conception of what rigorous AI research and practice should entail is needed. We believe such a conception -- i…

#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

Autonomous Resource Management in Microservice Systems via Reinforcement Learning
Yujun Zou, Nia Qi, Yingnan Deng, Zhihao Xue, Ming Gong, Wuyang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12879

Autonomous Resource Management in Microservice Systems via Reinforcement Learning
This paper proposes a reinforcement learning-based method for microservice resource scheduling and optimization, aiming to address issues such as uneven resource allocation, high latency, and insufficient throughput in traditional microservice architectures. In microservice systems, as the number of services and the load increase, efficiently scheduling and allocating resources such as computing power, memory, and storage becomes a critical research challenge. To address this, the paper employs…

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. 

E.P.A. Says It Will Eliminate Its Scientific Research Arm (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/climate/epa-firings-scientific-research.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250718/p135#a250718p135