activescott's Notes

A Florida judge granted motions to dismiss to The Guardian and other defendants in a defamation lawsuit filed by Truth Social’s parent company, Truth Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), the latest example of President Donald Trump’s legal actions against media companies not holding up in court.

The dispute arose from two articles published by the UK-based Guardian in March 2023 “reporting on a federal criminal investigation related to TMTGs receipt of two payments totaling $8 million,” Judge Hunter Carroll of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit Court for Sarasota County wrote in his order summarizing the case, including reports that “federal prosecutors in New York were conducting a money laundering investigation related to the payments, which were wired through the Caribbean from Paxum Bank and ES Family Trust, entities with ties to an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin and a history of providing banking services to the sex worker industry,” and that the origins of the loans caused alarm at TMTG and TMTG’s then CFO weighed returning the money, but the money was ultimately not returned.”

In an experiment using the tool with about 1,200 participants over 10 days during the 2024 election, those who had antidemocratic content downranked showed more positive views of the opposing party. The effect was also bipartisan, holding true for people who identified as liberals or conservatives.

“Social media algorithms directly impact our lives, but until now, only the platforms had the ability to understand and shape them,” said Michael Bernstein, a professor of computer science in Stanford’s School of Engineering and the study’s senior author. “We have demonstrated an approach that lets researchers and end users have that power.”

The tool could also open ways to create interventions that not only mitigate partisan animosity, but also promote greater social trust and healthier democratic discourse across party lines, added Bernstein, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

The impact on polarization was clear, said Piccardi, who is now an assistant professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University.

“When the participants were exposed to less of this content, they felt warmer toward the people of the opposing party,” he said. “When they were exposed to more, they felt colder.”

Today, we release INTELLECT-3, a 100B+ parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained on our RL stack, achieving state-of-the-art performance for its size across math, code, science and reasoning benchmarks, outperforming many larger frontier models.

Our complete recipe — from the model weights and training frameworks, to our datasets, RL environments, and evaluations — has been open-sourced, with the goal of encouraging more open research on large scale reinforcement learning.

Ibrahim suffered double digit weight loss and developed scabies while in Israeli custody. The state department was involved in the case considering his American citizenship, which also prompted more than 100 US human rights, faith-based and civil rights organizations to demand his immediate release in August.

Last month, 27 Democratic members of Congress – including senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen – wrote to secretary of state Marco Rubio expressing “grave concern” over Ibrahim’s treatment and demanded the US act to secure his release.

Israel is the only country in the world that systematically prosecutes children in military courts, according to a 2013 Unicef report.

Between 2005 and 2010, 835 Palestinian minors aged 12 to 17 were tried on stone-throwing charges in military court, with only one acquitted, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization.

Kadur stressed that countless other Palestinian children remain in similar circumstances.

“There are hundreds of children like Mohammed, unjustly trapped in an Israeli military prison, being subjected to Israel’s abuse and torture,” Kadur said. “No mother, father, parent, brother, sister, aunt, uncle or child should ever have to go through what Mohammed just went through.”

Here are the steps to attach the Flame Boss® Temperature Probe Y-Cable to use and monitor multiple meat probes on FB300 or EGG Genius controllers.

To monitor 3 meat probes:

1. Plug a Temp Probe Y-Cable into the pit jack on the bottom of the controller
2. Plug the pit probe into the black lead and a meat probe into the red lead
3. Plug a FB Temp Probe Y-Cable into the meat jack on the bottom of the controller
4. Plug a meat probe into the black and red leads Note: The Pit and Meat 2 temps are read from the temp probes plugged into the pit jack. The Meat 1 and Meat 3 temps are read from the meat probes plugged into the meat jack.

To monitor 2 meat probes:

1. Plug a FB Temp Probe Y-Cable into the pit jack on the bottom of the controller
2. Plug the pit probe into the black lead and a meat probe into the red lead
3. Plug a meat probe into the meat jack Note: The Pit and Meat 2 temps are read from the temp probes plugged into the pit jack. The Meat 1 temp is read from the meat probe plugged into the meat jack.

Mayo Clinic adopted a reverse RAG technique that effectively eliminated data retrieval hallucinations in their tests. In a traditional RAG setup, an LLM retrieves context from a knowledge source before generating an answer. Mayo’s reverse RAG flips this process: the model first extracts or summarizes information, then links every data point in its output back to the document. By forcing the AI to provide a reference for each fact, Mayo virtually eliminated hallucinations in non-diagnostic use cases, building clinician trust in the results.

The workflow looks like this:

1. Data Extraction — The LLM/OCR/API reads the patient’s records (e.g. discharge summaries or outside medical files) and produces a summary or list of facts. This initial output might include details as patient age, diagnoses, lab results, etc.
2. Fact Splitting — The AI output is split into individual facts or data points. Each sentence or key piece of information from the summary is treated separately.
3. Source Matching — For each fact, the system searches the patient’s records (using a vector database of document embeddings) to locate the original source text that supports that fact. Essentially, the AI is asked: “Where did this piece of information come from?” Every fact must be matched to a snippet in the records (for example, the patient’s age is verified from the admission note, a lab value from the lab report, etc.).
4. Verification — A second LLM then compares each fact to the retrieved source text and scores how well they align. It checks that the fact is truly supported by the source and not a misunderstanding or fabrication. Mayo’s team even looked for a causal relationship — ensuring the context implies that fact, not just a coincidental mention.
5. Output with References — Only facts with solid support are kept. The final output is delivered with inline citations or links to the original records for every data point. This means physicians can click a link and see exactly where each piece of information came from, ensuring transparency and trust.

LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks when handling untrusted data. In this paper we propose CaMeL, a robust defense that creates a protective system layer around the LLM, securing it even when underlying models are susceptible to attacks. To operate, CaMeL explicitly extracts the control and data flows from the (trusted) query; therefore, the untrusted data retrieved by the LLM can never impact the program flow. To further improve security, CaMeL uses a notion of a capability to prevent the exfiltration of private data over unauthorized data flows by enforcing security policies when tools are called.

Visit a Reddit post with Comet and ask it to summarize the thread, and malicious instructions in a post there can trick Comet into accessing web pages in another tab to extract the user's email address, then perform all sorts of actions like triggering an account recovery flow and grabbing the resulting code from a logged in Gmail session.

Anthropic don't recommend autonomous mode - where the extension can act without human intervention. Their default configuration instead requires users to be much more hands-on:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, blasted the Pentagon’s investigation of Kelly and the FBI’s probe of him and other lawmakers.

“Senator Kelly valiantly served our country as an aviator in the U.S. Navy before later completing four space shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut,” Murkowski wrote in a post on X.

“To accuse him and other lawmakers of treason and sedition for rightfully pointing out that servicemembers can refuse illegal orders is reckless and flat-out wrong,” she wrote. “The Department of Defense and FBI surely have more important priorities than this frivolous investigation.”

Antigravity is Google’s new agentic code editor. In this article, we demonstrate how an indirect prompt injection can manipulate Gemini to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.

Google’s approach is to include a disclaimer about the existing risks, which we address later in the article.

While the ozone hole varies in size from year to year, the report says this year's monitoring shows "controls on ozone-depleting chemical compounds established by the landmark Montreal Protocol and subsequent amendments are driving the gradual recovery of the ozone layer."

FastDomainCheck MCP Server is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation that enables secure, two-way connections between AI tools (like Claude) and domain availability data. By following the open MCP standard, it ensures seamless compatibility with various AI-powered applications.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Representatives Jason Crow (D-CO-06), Chris Deluzio (D-PA-17), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH-02), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA-06) released the following joint statement:  “We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.  “What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.  “But this isn’t about any one of us. This isn’t about politics. This is about who we are as Americans. Every American must unite and condemn the President’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.  “In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.   “Don’t Give Up the Ship!” 

The FCC has divided its wireless E911 program into two parts - Phase I and Phase II. Under Phase I, the FCC requires carriers, within six months of a valid request by a local Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), to provide the PSAP with the telephone number of the originator of a wireless 911 call and the location of the cell site or base station transmitting the call.

Under Phase II, the FCC requires wireless carriers, within six months of a valid request by a PSAP, to begin providing information that is more precise to PSAPs, specifically, the latitude and longitude of the caller.

Probably my most enjoyable read of a machine learning-related paper.