NEW RESOURCES

CODART: Curators’ Specializations Now Available on the CODART Website. “In the curators overview, you will find a new filter that allows you to select from various topics in terms of geographical regions, periods, media, themes and artists. Please note that only topics related to Dutch and Flemish art from about 1350 to 1750 are included. For example, if one selects the region of Spain, curators specializing in northern artists who were active in Spain will be presented, not curators specializing in Spanish artists.”

Syracuse University: University Football Films Collection Now Available Online. “Of the 430 films digitized from the larger Syracuse University Audiovisual Collection, nearly 400 are now available through SU Digital Collections, the Libraries’ digital library portal. The content forms the core of the new Syracuse University Football Films Collection, a virtual collection created for the digital library where materials can be searched by date, keyword and more.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: Bard Gets a ‘Google It’ Button and We’re Back at Square One, Folks . “During a press briefing on Tuesday, Google Bard vice president of engineering Amar Subramanya said one of the challenges with large language models is that they oftentimes present inaccurate information, confidently. So, to fix this issue of what he described as ‘the hallucination problem’, Google is sticking a ‘Google It’ button within Bard. Why….why not just bypass the middle bot and go straight to Google?”

TechCrunch: X’s crowdsourced fact-checking system will now let contributors consider opposing viewpoints . “X (formerly Twitter) this week changed how its crowdsourced fact-checking Community Notes feature works. In the new design, users will be able to review all the notes that have been proposed as annotations to an X post, rather than just the one note they’re currently reviewing. In other words, it will allow contributors to consider other notes before leaving their rating — and possibly, could convince them to change their mind.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New York Times: Tech Fears Are Showing Up on Picket Lines. “Unions aren’t just fighting for an inflation-beating wage boost. They also are campaigning for job security at a time when workers increasingly fear that shifts to new technologies, like electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, threaten their job, and tech bosses themselves say this gloomy outlook is inevitable.”

Mashable: How social media in the classroom is burning teachers out. “[Sari Beth] Rosenberg noticed the shift about a decade ago. Her students’ attention span seemed shorter, and the teens became more prone to distraction. Conflicts over being excluded or bullied via social media became routine. Students brought that tension into the classroom and hallways. Rosenberg noticed, through observation and conversation, how social media wore down her students’ mental health.”

Hell Gate: The TikTok NPC Streamers of SoHo . “People attuned to the summer’s internet fads would have known what the brothers were doing—the Flints are NPC streamers, a genre in which a content creator will mimic a non-player character in a video game. During their livestreams, these content creators idle like a background villager in an Elder Scrolls town would, until a viewer interacts with them by throwing them a virtual token via TikTok’s reward system, in which case they’ll perform a line of dialogue and one of the animations they’ve come up with for their character.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Google launches last-ditch effort to overturn $2.6 billion EU antitrust fine. “Alphabet’s Google on Tuesday made a last-ditch effort at Europe’s top court to overturn a 2.42 billion euro ($2.6 billion) EU antitrust fine imposed for market abuse related to its shopping service, saying that regulators failed to show that its practices were anti-competitive.”

Wall Street Journal: People Are Streaming Pirated Movies on TikTok, One Short Clip at a Time. “Accounts on the platform are posting episodes of TV shows and full-length films in bite-sized clips that users can watch in a long continuous string. If you search for ‘Barbie,’ odds are, you’ll be inundated with fan videos and chatter, and won’t see any of the clips. But TikTok’s algorithms might promote a 90-second snippet of the movie on users’ For You pages, with a cryptic title like Part 8. Once users watch a few clips, more and more might turn up.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

HackADay: Preserving Floppy Disks . “Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, floppy disks, and hard disk drives, and after several decades data may not be recoverable anymore. It’s always worth trying to back it up, though, especially if you have something on your hands like critical evidence or court records on a nearly 50-year-old floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11.”

Axios: Most U.S. adults don’t believe benefits of AI outweigh the risks, new survey finds. “54% of the 2,063 adults in a Mitre-Harris Poll survey in July said they were more concerned about the risks of AI than they were excited about the potential benefits. At the same time, 39% of adults said they believed today’s AI technologies are safe and secure — down 9 points from the previous survey in November 2022.”

Yahoo Finance: Americans spent $71B on social media impulse buys: Survey. “Americans are spending a lot of money on social media. According to a new Bankrate survey, 48% of social media users have made an impulse purchase, spending a whopping $71 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 57% of buyers regretted at least one purchase.” Good morning, Internet…

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