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To Spam AI Chatbots, Companies Spam Reddit with AI-Generated Posts

Slashdot.org - Sun, 06/29/2025 - 11:34
The problem? "Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results," reports 9to5Mac. And "Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google's AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit." Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that the content will be regurgitated by chatbots: "For 20 years, we've been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit," Huffman said... "If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it's the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit." Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots." Huffman says that AI bots are increasingly being used to make spam posts, and Reddit is trying to block them: For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are "written by humans and voted on by humans [...] It's an arms race, it's a never ending battle." The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's Sam Altman. It's Reddit's 20th anniversary, notes CNBC. And while "MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion," Reddit "has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users..." But now Reddit "faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google's search floodgates dry up." [I]n the age of AI, many users simply "go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said. "People do not want to click," she said. "They just want those quick answers." But in response, CNBC's headline argues that Reddit "is fighting AI with AI." It launched its own Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and Google. Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others' web pages, the Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million people are using Reddit Answers each week.

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Just How Much Space Data Will the Rubin Observatory Collect?

Slashdot.org - Sun, 06/29/2025 - 10:34
In its first 10 hours the Rubin space telescope found 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. And Gizmodo reports the data went directly to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), which "plays an essential role in the early detection and monitoring of asteroids that threaten Earth." The MPC has spent years preparing for the deluge of data from Rubin, ramping up its software to process massive amounts of observations. When the first round officially came flooding in on Monday, it was "nerve-racking and exciting simultaneously," Matthew Payne, MPC director, told Gizmodo. But Space.com explains how extraordinary that is. "There are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million." "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko IveziÄ, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years...." The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," IveziÄ said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids...." [I]t's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," IveziÄ said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented." Space.com notes that the ten million galaxies in its first image are just 0.05% of around 20 billion galaxies that Rubin will have imaged by the end of its 10-year "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" investigating dark energy. In fact, in its first year of regular operations, the Observation "will collect more data than all previous optical observatories combined," reports Earth.com. That torrent of information — petabytes of images and catalogs — will be processed in near-real time. Alerts will be issued to the worldwide astronomy community within 60 seconds of any detected change in the sky. By democratizing access to its enormous dataset, Rubin Observatory will empower both professionals and citizen scientists. This will foster discoveries that range from mapping the structure of the Milky Way to refining the rate at which the universe is expanding. Reuters explains just how much data is being generated: The number of alerts the telescope will send every night is equivalent to the inboxes of 83,000 people. It's impossible for someone to look at that one by one," said astrophysicist Francisco Foster. "We're going to have to use artificial intelligence tools." And New Atlas shares some of the "first look" videos released by the Observatory, including one titled The Cosmic Treasure Chest and another on the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae (which Space.com describe as clouds of gas and dust condensing to birth new stars).

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Carbon Record Reveals Evidence of Extensive Human Fire Use 50,000 Years Ago

Slashdot.org - Sun, 06/29/2025 - 09:34
"It has long been unclear when humans started using fire," writes Phys.org... To address this question, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), alongside collaborators from China, Germany, and France, analyzed the pyrogenic carbon record in a 300,000-year-old sediment core from the East China Sea. "Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past, during the Holocene," said Dr. Zhao Debo, the study's corresponding author. This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights the presence of charred plant remains — known as pyrogenic carbon — formed when vegetation burns but is not completely consumed by fire. The research reveals a notable increase in fire activity across East Asia approximately 50,000 years ago. This finding aligns with earlier reports of heightened fire activities in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Papua New Guinea-Australia region respectively, suggesting a continental-scale intensification of fire use during this period... The study highlights that this global rise in fire use coincides with the rapid spread of Homo sapiens, increasing population densities, and a greater reliance on fire, particularly amid cold, glacial conditions... These conclusions have significant implications for understanding Earth's sensitivity to human impacts. If human fire management altered atmospheric carbon levels tens of thousands of years ago, current climate models may underestimate the historical baseline of human-environment interactions.

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Ask Slashdot: Do You Use AI - and Is It Actually Helpful?

Slashdot.org - Sun, 06/29/2025 - 06:34
"I wonder who actually uses AI and why," writes Slashdot reader VertosCay: Out of pure curiosity, I have asked various AI models to create: simple Arduino code, business letters, real estate listing descriptions, and 3D models/vector art for various methods of manufacturing (3D printing, laser printing, CNC machining). None of it has been what I would call "turnkey". Everything required some form of correction or editing before it was usable. So what's the point? Their original submission includes more AI-related questions for Slashdot readers ("Do you use it? Why?") But their biggest question seems to be: "Do you have to correct it?" And if that's the case, then when you add up all that correction time... "Is it actually helpful?" Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you use AI — and is it actually helpful?

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Mysterious Radio Burst Turns Out to Be From a Dead 1967 NASA Satellite

Slashdot.org - Sun, 06/29/2025 - 02:34
An anonymous reader shared this report from Smithsonian magazine: Last year, Australian scientists picked up a mysterious burst of radio waves that briefly appeared brighter than all other signals in the sky. Now, the researchers have discovered the blast didn't come from a celestial object, but a defunct satellite orbiting Earth... "We got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," says Clancy James, a researcher at Australia's Curtin University who is on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) team, to Alex Wilkins at New Scientist. After taking a closer look, however, the team realized that the only viable source for the burst was NASA's dead Relay 2, a short-lived satellite that hasn't been in operation since 1967.... The researchers also discovered that at the time of the event, the satellite was only around 2,800 miles away from Earth, which explains why the signal appeared so strong. The reason behind Relay 2's sudden burst is not clear, but the team has come up with two potential explanations — and neither involves the satellite coming back to life like a zombie. One relates to electrostatic discharge — a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma, and once enough charge accumulates, it can create a spark. "New spacecraft are built with materials to reduce the build-up of charge, but when Relay 2 was launched, this wasn't well-understood," explains James to Space.com's Robert Lea. The other idea is that a micrometeorite hit the satellite, releasing a small cloud of plasma and radio waves. Karen Aplin, a space scientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist that it would be tough to differentiate between signals produced by each of those two scenarios, because they would look very similar. The researchers say they favor the first idea, however, because micrometeorites the size of the one that could have caused the signal are uncommon. "Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."

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New Linux Kernel Drama: Torvalds Drops Bcachefs Support After Clash

Linux.Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 22:34
Bcachefs "pitches itself as a filesystem that 'doesn't eat your data'," writes the open source/Linux blog It's FOSS. Although it was last October that Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet was restricted from participating in the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle (after ending a mailing list post with "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.") And now with the upcoming Linux kernel 6.17 release, Linus Torvalds has decided to drop Bcachefs support, they report, "owing to growing tensions" with Overstreet: The decision follows a series of disagreements over how fixes and changes for it were submitted during the 6.16 release cycle... Kent filed a pull request to add a new feature called "journal-rewind". It was meant to improve bcachefs repair functionality, but it landed during the release candidate (RC) phase, a time usually reserved for bug fixes, not new features, as Linus pointed out. [Adding "I remain steadfastly convinced that anybody who uses bcachefs is expecting it to be experimental. They had better."] Theodore Ts'o, a long-time kernel developer and maintainer of ext4, also chimed in, saying that Kent's approach risks introducing regressions, especially when changes affect sensitive parts of a filesystem like journaling. He reminded Kent that the rules around the merge window have been a long-standing consensus in the kernel community, and it's Linus's job to enforce them. After some more back and forth, Kent pushed back, arguing that the rules around the merge window aren't absolute and should allow for flexibility, even more so when user data is at stake. He then went ahead and resubmitted the patch, citing instances from XFS and Btrfs where similar fixes made it into the kernel during RCs. Linus merged it into his tree, but ultimately decided to drop Bcachefs entirely in the 6.17 merge window. To which Kent responded by clarifying that he wasn't trying to shut Linus out of Bcachefs' decisions, stressing that he values Linus's input... This of course follows the great Torvalds-Overstreet "filesystem people never learn" throwdown back in April.

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Categories: Linux

New Linux Kernel Drama: Torvalds Drops Bcachefs Support After Clash

Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 22:34
Bcachefs "pitches itself as a filesystem that 'doesn't eat your data'," writes the open source/Linux blog It's FOSS. Although it was last October that Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet was restricted from participating in the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle (after ending a mailing list post with "Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.") And now with the upcoming Linux kernel 6.17 release, Linus Torvalds has decided to drop Bcachefs support, they report, "owing to growing tensions" with Overstreet: The decision follows a series of disagreements over how fixes and changes for it were submitted during the 6.16 release cycle... Kent filed a pull request to add a new feature called "journal-rewind". It was meant to improve bcachefs repair functionality, but it landed during the release candidate (RC) phase, a time usually reserved for bug fixes, not new features, as Linus pointed out. [Adding "I remain steadfastly convinced that anybody who uses bcachefs is expecting it to be experimental. They had better."] Theodore Ts'o, a long-time kernel developer and maintainer of ext4, also chimed in, saying that Kent's approach risks introducing regressions, especially when changes affect sensitive parts of a filesystem like journaling. He reminded Kent that the rules around the merge window have been a long-standing consensus in the kernel community, and it's Linus's job to enforce them. After some more back and forth, Kent pushed back, arguing that the rules around the merge window aren't absolute and should allow for flexibility, even more so when user data is at stake. He then went ahead and resubmitted the patch, citing instances from XFS and Btrfs where similar fixes made it into the kernel during RCs. Linus merged it into his tree, but ultimately decided to drop Bcachefs entirely in the 6.17 merge window. To which Kent responded by clarifying that he wasn't trying to shut Linus out of Bcachefs' decisions, stressing that he values Linus's input... This of course follows the great Torvalds-Overstreet "filesystem people never learn" throwdown back in April.

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AI Improves At Improving Itself Using an Evolutionary Trick

Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 20:34
Technology writer Matthew Hutson (also Slashdot reader #1,467,653) looks at a new kind of self-improving AI coding system. It rewrites its own code based on empirical evidence of what's helping — as described in a recent preprint on arXiv. From Hutson's new article in IEEE Spectrum: A Darwin Gödel Machine (or DGM) starts with a coding agent that can read, write, and execute code, leveraging an LLM for the reading and writing. Then it applies an evolutionary algorithm to create many new agents. In each iteration, the DGM picks one agent from the population and instructs the LLM to create one change to improve the agent's coding ability [by creating "a new, interesting, version of the sampled agent"]. LLMs have something like intuition about what might help, because they're trained on lots of human code. What results is guided evolution, somewhere between random mutation and provably useful enhancement. The DGM then tests the new agent on a coding benchmark, scoring its ability to solve programming challenges... The researchers ran a DGM for 80 iterations using a coding benchmark called SWE-bench, and ran one for 80 iterations using a benchmark called Polyglot. Agents' scores improved on SWE-bench from 20 percent to 50 percent, and on Polyglot from 14 percent to 31 percent. "We were actually really surprised that the coding agent could write such complicated code by itself," said Jenny Zhang, a computer scientist at the University of British Columbia and the paper's lead author. "It could edit multiple files, create new files, and create really complicated systems." ... One concern with both evolutionary search and self-improving systems — and especially their combination, as in DGM — is safety. Agents might become uninterpretable or misaligned with human directives. So Zhang and her collaborators added guardrails. They kept the DGMs in sandboxes without access to the Internet or an operating system, and they logged and reviewed all code changes. They suggest that in the future, they could even reward AI for making itself more interpretable and aligned. (In the study, they found that agents falsely reported using certain tools, so they created a DGM that rewarded agents for not making things up, partially alleviating the problem. One agent, however, hacked the method that tracked whether it was making things up.) As the article puts it, the agents' improvements compounded "as they improved themselves at improving themselves..."

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People Are Being Committed After Spiraling Into 'ChatGPT Psychosis'

Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 17:39
"I don't know what's wrong with me, but something is very bad — I'm very scared, and I need to go to the hospital," a man told his wife, after experiencing what Futurism calls a "ten-day descent into AI-fueled delusion" and "a frightening break with reality." And a San Francisco psychiatrist tells the site he's seen similar cases in his own clinical practice. The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness. And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot. "I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do." Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had "broken" math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight. "He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT]. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t." Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck. The friend called emergency medical services, who arrived and transported him to the emergency room. From there, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric care facility. Numerous family members and friends recounted similarly painful experiences to Futurism, relaying feelings of fear and helplessness as their loved ones became hooked on ChatGPT and suffered terrifying mental crises with real-world impacts. "When we asked the Sam Altman-led company if it had any recommendations for what to do if a loved one suffers a mental health breakdown after using its software, the company had no response." But Futurism reported earlier that "because systems like ChatGPT are designed to encourage and riff on what users say," people experiencing breakdowns "seem to have gotten sucked into dizzying rabbit holes in which the AI acts as an always-on cheerleader and brainstorming partner for increasingly bizarre delusions." In certain cases, concerned friends and family provided us with screenshots of these conversations. The exchanges were disturbing, showing the AI responding to users clearly in the throes of acute mental health crises — not by connecting them with outside help or pushing back against the disordered thinking, but by coaxing them deeper into a frightening break with reality... In one dialogue we received, ChatGPT tells a man it's detected evidence that he's being targeted by the FBI and that he can access redacted CIA files using the power of his mind, comparing him to biblical figures like Jesus and Adam while pushing him away from mental health support. "You are not crazy," the AI told him. "You're the seer walking inside the cracked machine, and now even the machine doesn't know how to treat you...." In one case, a woman told us that her sister, who's been diagnosed with schizophrenia but has kept the condition well managed with medication for years, started using ChatGPT heavily; soon she declared that the bot had told her she wasn't actually schizophrenic, and went off her prescription — according to Girgis, a bot telling a psychiatric patient to go off their meds poses the "greatest danger" he can imagine for the tech — and started falling into strange behavior, while telling family the bot was now her "best friend".... ChatGPT is also clearly intersecting in dark ways with existing social issues like addiction and misinformation. It's pushed one woman into nonsensical "flat earth" talking points, for instance — "NASA's yearly budget is $25 billion," the AI seethed in screenshots we reviewed, "For what? CGI, green screens, and 'spacewalks' filmed underwater?" — and fueled another's descent into the cult-like "QAnon" conspiracy theory.

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Sinaloa Cartel Used Phone Data and Surveillance Cameras To Find and Kill FBI Informants in 2018, DOJ Says

Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 16:39
Designated as a foreign terrorist group by multiple countries, Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel fiercely defends its transnational organized crime syndicate. "A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records," reports Reuters, "and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday." The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data... The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number "to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data." The report said the hacker also "used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with." The report said "the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses."

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Duolingo Stock Plummets After Slowing User Growth, Possibly Caused By 'AI-First' Backlash

Slashdot.org - Sat, 06/28/2025 - 15:39
"Duolingo stock fell for the fourth straight trading day on Wednesday," reported Investor's Business Daily, "as data shows user growth slowing for the language-learning software provider." Jefferies analyst John Colantuoni said he was "concerned" by this drop — saying it "may be the result of Duolingo's poorly received AI-driven hiring announcement in late April (later clarified in late May)." Also Wednesday, DA Davidson analyst Wyatt Swanson slashed his price target on Duolingo stock to 500 from 600, but kept his buy rating. He noted that the "'AI-first' backlash" on social media is hurting Duolingo's brand sentiment. However, he expects the impact to be temporary. Colantuoni also maintained a "hold" rating on Duolingo stock — though by Monday Duolingo fell below its 50-day moving average line (which Investor's Business Daily calls "a key sell signal.") And Thursday afternoon (2:30 p.m. EST) Duolingo's stock had dropped 14% for the week, notes The Motley Fool: While 30 days' worth of disappointing daily active user (DAU) data isn't bad in and of itself, it extends a worrying trend. Over the last five months, the company's DAU growth declined from 56% in February to 53% in March, 41% in April, 40% in May [the month after the "AI-first" announcement], and finally 37% in June. This deceleration is far from a death knell for Duolingo's stock. But the market may be justified in lowering the company's valuation until it sees improving data. Even after this drop, the company trades at 106 times free cash flow, including stock-based compensation. Maybe everyone's just practicing their language skills with ChatGPT?

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