Fact Check: FAKE Image Shows U.S. Embassy In Saudi Arabia On Fire After Drone Attack -- It's AI-Generated: https://benborges.xyz/2026/03/03/fact-check-fake-image-shows.html
Pinterest users, especially artists, says the platform has gotten worse in the past year due to AI moderation, AI-generated art, and AI features (Matthew Gault/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/pinterest-is-drowning-in-a-sea-of-ai-slop-and-auto-moderat…
This came in via #B3ta but hilariously it recalls one of my first generative compositions from well-before the computer era, my submission to some CBC call for composers and done the old-fashioned way, graph paper and pencil, I used Conway's Live the same way, but on tablature for classical guitar.
It was a bitch to play and I didn't win any award, but in late-70's CBC 'classical' sensibilities, I submitted it as a lark, although I was serious. Well, mostly: the second section of Conway's Life for Guitar used a starting pattern that would last the duration, but was then CONSTRAINED by a musical rules of harmony using Jerome Kern's All The Things You Are to assassinate non-conforming tones and indeed, as expected, I found the notion of Harmony to be highly toxic. No one likes a composer with a sense of humour 😆
So far as I know, no recordings of my entry exist, the score is likely somewhere in the bottom of my notorious trunk so hated every moving day.
Conway's Life Music
https://vovanz.github.io/conways-life-music/
Bikelution: Federated Gradient-Boosting for Scalable Shared Micro-Mobility Demand Forecasting
Antonios Tziorvas, Andreas Tritsarolis, Yannis Theodoridis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20671 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20671
arXiv:2602.20671v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The rapid growth of dockless bike-sharing systems has generated massive spatio-temporal datasets useful for fleet allocation, congestion reduction, and sustainable mobility. Bike demand, however, depends on several external factors, making traditional time-series models insufficient. Centralized Machine Learning (CML) yields high-accuracy forecasts but raises privacy and bandwidth issues when data are distributed across edge devices. To overcome these limitations, we propose Bikelution, an efficient Federated Learning (FL) solution based on gradient-boosted trees that preserves privacy while delivering accurate mid-term demand forecasts up to six hours ahead. Experiments on three real-world BSS datasets show that Bikelution is comparable to its CML-based variant and outperforms the current state-of-the-art. The results highlight the feasibility of privacy-aware demand forecasting and outline the trade-offs between FL and CML approaches.
toXiv_bot_toot
Very nice German/French documentary about the Alps as central Europe's weather & climate generator (available until end of May):
Die Alpen - Europas Wetterküche
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/110976-000-A/die-alpen-europas-wetterkueche/
Adobe launches Firefly Custom Models in public beta, letting users train AI image generators on their own assets; the custom models are private by default (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/897243/adobe-firefly-ai-custom-models-ima…
US-based Credo, which specializes in data center connectivity, agrees to acquire Israeli chip company DustPhotonics in a cash-and-stock deal worth up to $1.3B (CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/d9pizceo2