In their race to push out new versions with more capability, AI companies leave users vulnerable to “LLM grooming” efforts that promote bogus information.

Summary

Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool artificial intelligence chatbots on key topics, offering a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform.

Experts warn the problem is worsening as more people rely on chatbots rushed to market, social media companies cut back on moderation and the Trump administration disbands government teams fighting disinformation.

“Most chatbots struggle with disinformation,” said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. “They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can’t reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information.”

Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations.

Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool artificial intelligence chatbots on key topics, offering a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform.

Experts warn the problem is worsening as more people rely on chatbots rushed to market, social media companies cut back on moderation and the Trump administration disbands government teams fighting disinformation.

“Most chatbots struggle with disinformation,” said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. “They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can’t reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information.”

Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations.

Good riddance.

Three people in Hood River County have contacted Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease over the span of eight months, an unusual pattern for an incredibly rare disease.

A small Oregon county has been struck by one of the rarest but scariest ailments known to exist. Health officials in Hood River County have reported an unusual cluster of people coming down with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or CJD.

Three residents in the area have contracted CJD over the past eight months, according to the Hood River County Health Department, two of whom are already dead. Local and federal health officials are now investigating the cluster, but they have not identified a link between the cases to date.

While CJD is the most common prion disease, only around 500 new cases of it are estimated to happen in the U.S. annually. This rarity makes three cases showing up so close together in the same relatively small county (roughly 24,000 people live in Hood River) all the weirder.

S6:E3 - Force Projection: Bobbie and Amos forget the Cant.

1.4.37

Apologies for the rapid release cycle this week. I'm taking advantage of the rare overlap in free time and motivation and trying to knock out all the low-hanging fruit as far as bugs and annoyances go plus incorporate feedback from the prior releases. The smaller, faster releases also help prevent me from getting too deep into feature creep.

Minor update with bugfixes, UI polish and, at least for now, the removal of a few rarely-used post views (they're rarely used and incompatible with the rewrite to the post body component).

Bugfixes

• Revert throw error in /post/instance/postid loader as it was preventing the prettier error in +page.svelte from showing
• Private message report modal wasn't closing properly.
• Issue 35: Preview length setting counts markup and trims before applying it resulting in short previews and broken links.
• Annoyance: When an <hr> element was used toward the top of the post body, it would wrap below the thumbnail image in compact view. Changed width to max-width in the markdown post CSS.

Changes

Post Action Buttons

On desktop post action buttons are now in a single row. On mobile and smaller-width desktop, the actiom buttons reflow to two rows as they were in the previous release. This makes better use of the available space as well as making the post header slightly more compact.

Post Body Previews in Feed

The post body has been re-implemented in the feed. This fixes issue 35 as well as provides a better-looking post preview.

Instead of a dumb substring from 0 to postBodyPreviewLength of the pre-rendered post body text, it now renders the body in full and conditionally limits the height of the container. This ensures the content is rendered correctly when collapsed as well as being cleaner, better looking, and more responsive.

Removed Unused View Modes

Due to the architectural change of the post body component (as well as lack of use), the "Reader", "Ultra-Compact", "More-Compact", and "Compacter" view modes have been removed. They would have required re-implementation from scratch anyway, so I just got rid of them. If there is demand, or you want any of those back, let me know, and I can re-introduce them using the new post body render method.

If your view was set to any of those, it will now migrate it to "wide-compact" which is the closest remaining view.

Removed Settings:

• Post Body Preview Length (No longer needed/used)
• Post View Mode options (no longer compatible without fully re-implementing):
  • Compacter
  • More Compact
  • Ultra-Compact
  • Reader

Tags

• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.37
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.37
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

In a recent interview with Wired, Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan discusses his book Why We Die, in which he argues that death is not genetically programmed but rather a consequence of evolution favoring reproduction over longevity. Here are some of the most thought-provoking excerpts:

WIRED: Professor Ramakrishnan, the crucial question in your book is why we die. But exactly what is death?

Venki Ramakrishnan: By death, we mean the irreversible loss of the ability to function as a coherent individual. It is the result of the failure of a critical system or apparatus, for example, heart, brain, lung, or kidney failure. In this sense there is an apparent paradox: When our organism, as a whole, is alive, millions of cells within us are constantly dying, and we do not even realize it. On the other hand, at the time of death, most of the cells in our bodies are still alive, and entire organs are still functioning and can be donated to people in need of transplantation. But at that point the body has lost the ability to function as a whole. In this sense, it is therefore important to distinguish between cell death and death of the individual.

Speaking of death and aging, you say in your most recent book that you "wanted to offer an objective look at our current understanding of the two phenomena." What was the biggest surprise or most deeply held belief that you had to reconsider while writing and researching this work?

There have been several surprises, actually. One is that death, contrary to what one might think, is not programmed by our genes. Evolution does not care how long we live, but merely selects the ability to pass on our genes, a process known as "fitness" in evolutionary biology. Thus, the traits that are selected are those that help us survive childhood and reproduce. And it is these traits, later in life, that cause aging and decline. Another curious finding was the fact that aging is not simply due to wear and tear on cells. Wear and tear happens constantly in all living things, yet different species have very different lifespans. Instead, lifespan is the result of a balance between the expenditure of resources needed to keep the organism functioning and repairing it and those needed to make it grow, mature, and keep it healthy until it reproduces and nurtures offspring.

Do you think there is an aspect of the biology of aging that is still deeply misunderstood by the general public?

Certainly the indefinite extension of life. Although in principle there are no laws or constraints that prevent us from living much longer than we do currently, great longevity or "eternal youth" are still far off, and very significant obstacles to increasing our maximum life expectancy remain. We must also beware of the pseudoscience -- and business -- around the concepts of "anti-aging" or the "reversal of aging." These are often baseless concepts, unsupported by hard evidence, even though they may use language that sounds scientific. Unfortunately, we are all afraid of growing old and dying, so we are very sensitive to any claim that promises to help us avoid it. [...]

What do you think are the social and ethical implications of our desire to live longer?

Ever since we became aware of our mortality, we have desired to defeat aging and death. However, our individual desires may conflict with what is best for society. A society in which fertility rates are very low and lifespans are very high will be a stagnant society, with very slow generational turnover, and probably much less dynamic and creative. The Nobel Prize-winning South American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who recently passed away, expressed it best: "Old age on the one hand terrifies us, but when we feel anxious, it is important to remember how terrible it would be to live forever. If eternity were guaranteed, all the incentives and illusions of life would vanish. This thought can help us live old age in a better way."

Community colleges have been dealing with an unprecedented phenomenon: fake students bent on stealing financial aid funds. While it has caused chaos at many colleges, some Southwestern faculty feel their leaders haven’t done enough to curb the crisis.

Ever since the pandemic forced schools to go virtual, the number of online classes offered by community colleges has exploded. That has been a welcome development for many students who value the flexibility online classes offer. But it has also given rise to the incredibly invasive and uniquely modern phenomenon of bot students now besieging community college professors like Smith.

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

Summary: Unless anyone speaks up, I'm leaning toward removing those two views.

I'm rewriting the component for the post body preview in the feed to address my own gripes as well as Issue 35 in Github.

TL;DR is that the "Ultra-Compact" and "Reader" views rely on the "Post Body Preview Length" setting and the old method of doing the previews which was just a dumb "show X characters of the post body" based on the un-rendered body markdown.

The new method uses the rendered output and controls the height of the body text for a similar effect. It's also MUCH more responsive and able to take the screen width into account. In short, it's much more flexible, looks much better, and is probably what I should have done the first time.

"Reader" and "Ultra-Compact" rely on a setting that I'm going to be removing. So, rather than re-implement those and complicate what is, finally, a clean/simple refactor, can I just get rid of them?

If you're using them, that's fine. It's no problem to re-implement. But if no one is using them, I'd just assume get rid of them.

Currently, the post buttons are always a double row. In dev, I've set them to be a single row on desktop and reflow to 2 rows when the screen width goes below the xl breakpoint for smaller viewports and mobile (see main post image).

I like it, and I think it makes better use of the available space + more compact on desktop, but before I change the post buttons again, thought I'd ask for feedback. This is probably not something I'm going to make an option for (there's too many options already lol).

Current Layout: Post action buttons/indicators are always two rows.