NEW RESOURCES

Minnesota Judicial Branch: Court of Appeals Special Term Orders Now Available Online. “The Minnesota Court of Appeals, in partnership with the Minnesota State Law Library, is now making available the Court of Appeals’ Special Term Orders in an easily searchable online database on the State Law Library website. The database includes Special Term Orders issued beginning January of this year.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Elon Musk keeps laying off Twitter employees after saying cuts were done. “On November 21st, Elon Musk gathered Twitter’s remaining employees at its San Francisco headquarters to tell them that, after forcing out roughly two-thirds of the workforce in a matter of weeks, layoffs were over. He keeps laying people off anyway.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Free Solo.to and Linktree Alternatives to Make Link-in-Bio Social Profile Pages. “Several social media sites don’t let you add multiple links in your bio. The best workaround for this is to make a bio-link or link-in-bio page that lets you add links and other details about yourself using simple and free-to-use web apps like these.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Windows Central: Microsoft rolled out its deranged Bing Chat AI in India 4 months ago, and no one noticed. “New evidence shows that Microsoft publicly tested Bing Chat (codenamed ‘Sidney’) in November in India. Moreover, there were already documented complaints about the AI going loopy after long conversations, which became apparent to many after Microsoft’s announcement.”

Washington Post: Russian propagandists said to buy Twitter blue-check verifications. “The accounts claim to be based outside of Russia, so they can pay for verification without running afoul of U.S. sanctions. But they pass along articles from state-run media, statements by Russian officials, and lies about Ukraine from Kremlin allies, according to the research group Reset, which shared its findings with The Washington Post.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Honolulu Civil Beat: The Military’s Public Information Black Hole. “Since I started reporting in Hawaii in 2019, I’ve filed numerous FOIA requests with the military, primarily the Navy. Time and again, I have filed one with the hopes of shining a light on an issue of public importance only to have it fizzle into nothingness. The Freedom of Information Act, which is supposed to provide the transparency needed for a healthy democracy, is too often a pathway to a dead end that leaves us in the dark on critical issues.”

Motherboard: Companies Can’t Ask You to Shut up to Receive Severance, NLRB Rules. “The National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that employers can no longer demand laid-off employees avoid publicly disparaging the company as part of their severance agreements, nor can they stop affected employees from disclosing the terms of their exit packages.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

VentureBeat: New research suggests that privacy in the metaverse might be impossible. “The research analyzed more than 2.5 million VR data recordings (fully anonymized) from more than 50,000 players of the popular Beat Saber app and found that individual users could be uniquely identified with more than 94% accuracy using only 100 seconds of motion data. Even more surprising was that half of all users could be uniquely identified with only 2 seconds of motion data.”

Arizona State University: Do the math: ChatGPT sometimes can’t, expert says. “In a paper that was accepted to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for its spring symposium, [Professor Paulo] Shakarian detailed results of a study in which he tested ChatGPT on 1,000 mathematical word problems.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Boing Boing: 2Dumb2Destroy is a new AI ChatBot trained on the dumbest dudebros imaginable. “Trained on countless hours of Pauly Shore movies, all seven Police Academies, Ralph Wiggum quotes and that one bodybuiling forum where a bunch of gym bros decided a week had eight days in it, etc. This is one A.I. you don’t have to worry about ever overthrowing humanity, or stealing your job.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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