news

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32974288

More than 20 countries are convening in Bogota next week to declare “concrete measures against Israel’s violations of international law”, diplomats told Middle East Eye.

The “emergency summit” is due to be held on 15-16 July, co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of The Hague Group, to coordinate diplomatic and legal action to counter what they describe as “a climate of impunity” enabled by Israel and its powerful allies.

The founding members of the group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.

States due to take part in the summit include Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Lebanon, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Portugal, Spain, Qatar, Turkey, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine.

linky

While everyone was focused on the BBB and its implications for student loans they just go ahead and do this.

The MV Eternity C is the fourth cargo ship that Yemeni forces have sunk during their anti-genocide solidarity campaign.

Snip:

In a statement on Wednesday, the Yemeni armed forces announced that its navy “targeted the ship ‘ETERNITY C’, which was heading to the port of Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) in Occupied Palestine”, after its crew ignored warnings and calls issued by the naval forces.

According to the statement, the military operation was carried out with “an unmanned surface vehicle and six cruise and ballistic missiles.”

Noting that the vessel “completely sank”, the statement said the operation was “documented with audio and video.”

The crew was, however, “rescued” and “transported to a safe place” by the Yemeni forces, the statement said.

At least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees are set to leave under a push to shed staff, according to documents obtained by POLITICO — potentially spelling trouble for White House space policy and depriving the agency of decades of experience.

Handing the next century of space exploration to China, who is planning a sample return mission to Mars by 2028, land on the Moon by 2030, and construct a moon base by 2035.

The American Federation of Teachers said it would use the $23 million, including $500,000 from the A.I. start-up Anthropic, to create a national training center.

https://archive.is/GDMyT

The tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms is accelerating.

You know, I'm very broadly against private schools and homeschooling, but honestly this is making at least reconsider homeschooling.

The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest U.S. teachers’ union, said on Tuesday that it would start an A.I. training hub for educators with $23 million in funding from three leading chatbot makers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.

The union said it planned to open the National Academy for A.I. Instruction in New York City, starting with hands-on workshops for teachers this fall on how to use A.I. tools for tasks like generating lesson plans.

While it's good that teachers still retain oversight over the work they'll be doing its still a fucking mistake to incorporate a fucking tickle-me-Hal-9000 into the education of the youth of tomorrow.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the A.I. academy was inspired by other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, that have worked with industry partners to set up high-tech training centers.

Carpentry. An industry that's been historically compared to education.

The New York hub will be “an innovative new training space where school staff and teachers will learn not just about how A.I. works, but how to use it wisely, safely and ethically,” Ms. Weingarten said in an interview. “It will be a place where tech developers and educators can talk with each other, not past each other.”

It would be infinitely better to just gut the chatbot industry and all the vipers in it.

The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots. These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.

Human-like essays such as how to iron the wrinkles out your ballsack, how may pebbles to you need to eat per day for a balanced diet, how smoking two-three cigarettes per day is healthy for pregnant women, etc. Great education for impressionable minds.

In February, California State University, the largest U.S. university system, said it would provide ChatGPT for some 460,000 students. This spring, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest U.S. school district, began rolling out Google’s Gemini A.I. for more than 100,000 high schoolers.

We're doooooooooooooooooooomed im feeling super whooooooooooo right now

The Trump administration, which recently froze nearly $7 billion in funding for schools, has called on industry to pony up for A.I. education. Last week, the White House urged American companies and nonprofit groups to provide A.I. grants, technology and training materials for schools, teachers and students. Since then, dozens of companies have signed on, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.

Working on privatization of public services of course.

Some tech executives hope A.I. will become the fourth R.

Some communists hope ai tech executives will be the first to talk to the brick wall.

“Reading and writing and arithmetic and learning how to use A.I.,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. “You’re going to have to learn those skills over time, and I do think our education system is the best place to be able to do that.”

Why is learning how to manipulate a chatbot so important? I'll tell you why.

But some researchers have warned that generative A.I. tools are so new in schools that there is little evidence of concrete educational benefit — and significant concern about risk.

Zero benefits, all risk. It would be like making the titanic 2 but with a 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 United States Naval Gun loaded forward facing into the prow of the ship under the deck waterline for the express purpose of destroying ice bergs before they impact the ship. But a thousand times less funny to watch.

Chatbots can produce plausible-sounding misinformation, which could mislead students. A recent study by law school professors found that three popular A.I. tools made “significant” errors summarizing a law casebook and posed an “unacceptable risk of harm” to learning. Outsourcing tasks like research and writing to A.I. chatbots may also hinder critical thinking, a recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found.

Corporate translation chatbots go when asked anything

“I do think that there is a risk,” said Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, noting that he frequently cited the critical thinking study to employees. He added that more rigorous academic research on the effects of generative A.I. was needed. “The lesson of social media is don’t dismiss problems or concerns.”

These fuckers know it's gonna just fuck shit up but who gives a shit when there's money involved

Union experts have also raised alarms about the industry’s practices. Some tech companies have trained their A.I. models on swaths of texts scraped from the internet, without compensating writers and other creators, or outsourced the labeling of training data to low-paid workers.

Yeah it's all stolen shit and they want you to pay them for doing it.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over copyright infringement of news content. Both companies have denied wrongdoing.)

Lmao

Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, also warned that tech firms could use A.I. deals with schools and the teachers’ union as marketing opportunities to make students lifetime chatbot customers.

Another fun thing, futher fuckjng commodification of every aspect of our fucking lives

“It’s a long-game investment by companies to turn young people into consumers who identify with a particular brand,” said Dr. Griffey, a vice president of University Council-A.F.T. Local 1474, a union representing University of California librarians and lecturers.

Kinda like how Apple computers made a whole generation of easily gifted pseud-hipsters

Ms. Weingarten said that she was aware of the concerns and that her union, which represents 1.8 million members, had developed A.I. school use guidelines to address some of them.

Yeah bullshit

One of her main goals is to ensure that teachers have some input on how A.I. tools are developed for educational use, she said. In 2023, she began discussing the idea with Microsoft’s Mr. Smith.

Should've stonewalled the entire thing out Weingarten.

The union’s partnership with Microsoft formally began last summer with an A.I. symposium in Chicago where teachers learned chatbot basics and gave the company feedback on potential classroom uses. After Ms. Weingarten met last year with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, the union also began working with OpenAI.

[The union’s new training hub will be in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 New York City teachers and other school employees.

Microsoft will provide $12.5 million for the A.I. training effort over the next five years, and OpenAI will contribute $8 million in funding and $2 million in technical resources. Anthropic will add $500,000 for the first year of the effort.

Go bust and sink the economy

On Monday, some 200 New York City teachers taking an A.I. workshop at their union headquarters got a glimpse of what the new national effort might look like. A presenter from Microsoft opened by showing an A.I. explainer video featuring Minecraft, the popular game owned by Microsoft.

Fucking gross

Next, the teachers tried generating emails and lesson plans using Khanmigo, an A.I. tool for schools for which Microsoft has provided support. Then they experimented with Copilot for similar tasks.

How fucking hard is it to write a fucking email

During the workshop, Peter Bass, a first-grade teacher in Manhattan who is an A.I. newbie, asked a chatbot to generate “an effective letter to parents on attendance.” He read the polite but firm email that resulted aloud — to laughter from teachers in the room.

“I’m very old school,” Mr. Bass said, noting that he typically drafted his own letters to “students individually, based on who they are.” Now, though, he said he was intrigued to see if he could streamline his process with A.I.

“If I could find a way of microwaving it a little,” Mr. Bass said, “it could be useful.”

She got TRIGGERED by mechahitlermusk and quit, typical millennial can't take the heat

Can you believe it folks, I'm outside in my jorts, old man shorts, sunning myself, with no sunscreen mind you, that stuff causes cancer, and Iran, of all people, tries to drone strike me in my naval. Very rude, I'll have you know, I have actually the strongest naval of any president, that, quite frankly, anyone has ever seen.

ugh what woke trash, this doll is literally unfuckable