ptz

...predictably awesome!

Last summar/fall, I was absolutely overrun with yellow jackets and had to buy some traps. Caught hundreds of them, but that was just treating the symptoms (could only locate/destroy 1 out of who-knows-how-many hives).

The trick is to catch the queens in the spring, and my reusable trap has caught two so far. That's two hives I don't have to worry about this summer.

At least we're trying here, your majesty.

Bev was not surprised the people most likely to be holding at the party were also the only ones off to the side with big plates of food.

Edit/Reupload: Forgot Odo was there, too.

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.