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Nicole Hennig

@nic221.bsky.social
5.3K followers 408 following 4.8K posts

E-learning dev & AI educator at U of Arizona Libraries. Former head of UX at MIT Libraries. Winner of MIT Excellence Award. nicolehennig.com. Digital nomad from 2013-17, locationflexiblelife.com. - vegetarian - car-free - universal basic income: yes

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11h
Al Gore says the real AI risk isn't data centers | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/al-… #AI #DataCenters
Text Shot: “I much prefer those that are supplying their energy needs with renewables and batteries,” he continued, saying he expects more companies to move inexorably in that direction simply because renewables are increasingly the cheapest option available.
In fact, Gore thinks the public backlash at planning-commission meetings has less to do with carbon emissions than with anxiety over automation upending society in the not-too-distant future.
“I think that part of the reason for the growing bipartisan opposition to data centers in so many parts of the U.S. is being driven by the underlying concerns about job losses and some of the other threats that experts inside OpenAI and inside Anthropic have been trying to alert the public to,” he said.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11h
Animating Charts, Advent of Agents, and Death of Chatbots vibegenealogy.ai/p/animating-ch… #AI #agents #FamilyHistory
vibegenealogy.ai
Animating Charts, Advent of Agents, and Death of Chatbots
How I animated a pedigree chart with Meta's Muse, and why the age of the chatbot is drawing to a close
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 14h
Let skills in Gemini tackle your most repetitive tasks blog.google/products-and-p… #AI #Gemini #Google (Gems going away)
Text Shot: In the coming weeks, skills will have the features you loved in Gems, including the ability to share them with others and add files from Google Drive and notebooks from Gemini Notebook. As we bring more functionality to skills, we will remove support for Gems starting in November for individuals with personal accounts,
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 14h
DevDay 2026 Recap - Open AI openai.com/index/devday-2… #AI #OpenAI
openai.com
DevDay 2026 Recap
Explore more than 20 announcements from OpenAI DevDay 2026, including GPT-6 Astra, ChatGPT, Codex, APIs, security, and new tools for builders.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 14h
Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol - OpenAI openai.com/index/introduc… #AI #OpenAI
Text Shot: We’re introducing GPT‑6.1 Sol, an upgrade to GPT‑6 Sol that nearly matches GPT‑6 Astra’s intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s standard input and output token prices. Cached input costs just $0.10 per million tokens—95% less than standard input pricing and 50% less than GPT‑6 Sol’s cached input pricing—giving developers more room to build and run capable agents that reuse context across requests.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 14h
Introducing dots - OpenAI openai.com/index/introduc… #AI #agents #Dots
Text Shot: Dots are rolling out today in ChatGPT to Pro and Business Premium users in eligible markets⁠(opens in a new window). Enterprise users (including Edu and Healthcare) can try the beta when their workspace admin enables it.
Your first dot is included in your Pro or Business Premium plan at no extra cost. It’s available 24/7 to talk, help you think, and stay on top of what matters to you. Your plan also includes an allowance for deeper work, with extended limits for the first month after launch. In the future, you’ll be able to add more dots, and scale the output of each dot by either increasing its speed or the total amount of work it can take on per month.
Conversations with your dot don’t count toward your ChatGPT usage limits. When you ask your dot to start or manage tasks in Codex or ChatGPT Work, those tasks count toward your usage limits as usual.
To get started, create your first dot in the ChatGPT desktop app or your desktop browser, connect your apps, and let it…
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Vibe Check: OpenAI DevDay 2026 every.to/vibe-check/vib… #AI #OpenAI
Text Shot: Now, with Astra , and Opus 5.5–level models, we’re moving toward one persistent agent that knows our work, keeps track of what’s changed, and brings in other agents as needed. This is a form factor that’s been obviously coming since the OpenClaw craze eight months ago, but now the models are good enough that big companies including Meta, X, and now OpenAI are getting in the game.
I find the pace of the updates exhilarating, and manually starting and managing individual Codex or ChatGPT threads already feels a little archaic. But I am also a little tired and confused. Feature velocity is great when it feels coherent, but even a power user like me has a lot to figure out, and it doesn’t all work yet.
I’m excited to keep using these products. I’d be even more excited if the next time I opened ChatGPT, there was less for me to figure out.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Meet OpenAI's "dots" — a new AI assistant meant to take on Meta's Muse. www.axios.com/2026/09/29/ope… #AI #agents
Text Shot: Dots, as OpenAI calls them, are agents that can be instructed to perform a wide range of tasks.

Users provide a goal to a dot and set boundaries for what it can do on its own. The assistant can keep work moving in the background and reach out when it needs attention or more detail to complete a task.
Dots "are an extension of you," OpenAI says, and are meant to compete with a growing crop of consumer-focused AI assistants that people have used to book travel, cancel subscriptions and for all manner of other tasks.
The big picture: Agents are all the rage, and while the technology or goal is often the same, the approaches and capabilities vary, especially for Meta and OpenAI.

Meta dove head first into the consumer market, launching Muse widely to its massive multi-billion-number user base, with the app topping the download charts in its early days of availability.
OpenAI is targeting high-end subscribers, mostly developers, at least in the beginning.
Apple's AI isn't…
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Practical AI for Library Workers: From Concerns to Solutions (my online course, join us! Begins Oct 13) nicolehennig.com/practical-ai-f… #AI #librarians #libraries #educators #courses
Text Shot: New online course! October 13 – November 23, 2026
>> Sign up at Infopeople <<
AI is becoming integrated into many of the tools we use, but how we use it and what we choose to use it for is not inevitable. Library workers can help shape the direction society takes with these technologies.
Rather than treating AI as either a miracle or a menace, we’ll take a balanced, hopeful, and hands-on approach. We’ll take inspiration from solutions journalism, an approach that examines how people, communities, and institutions respond to problems and investigates which responses are making meaningful differences.
We’ll go beyond chatbots to explore emerging forms of AI, including vibe-coding, agentic AI, and other ways AI can help people work with information. You’ll leave with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and inspiration for using AI in ways that strengthen human judgment, creativity, accessibility, and learning.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
2026 in LLMs (so far) - Simon Willison simonw.substack.com/p/2026-in-llms… #AI #coding #agents #progress
simonw.substack.com
2026 in LLMs (so far)
Plus Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Meta prepares screen viewing and web voice calls for Muse www.testingcatalog.com/meta-prepares-… #AI #Meta #Muse #agents
Text Shot: Meta Connect 2026 has wrapped up, but Meta appears to have more Muse updates beyond what it showed during the event. We spotted two additions being prepared in a recent Muse web build: persistent access to the agent’s screen and an updated web-based voice calling experience.
The screen view would live in a dedicated tab alongside areas such as identity and updates. When Muse is carrying out a task through its virtual computer, users can open the tab and watch what is happening on the agent’s screen. This could make longer computer-use tasks easier to follow without relying only on status messages.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
War Bros Didn’t Always Rule Silicon Valley | - Steven Levy WIRED archive.is/otX1w (this is so good. I remember those days) #AI #techBros #SiliconValley #history
Text Shot: The story as I see it is that beginning in the late 1970s, a new generation of technologists, identifying with the counterculture, operated with a set of values that unleashed innovation and ironically set the stage for the industry’s current wealth. Yes, that movement carried a torch from the field’s defense industry roots. But even as DOD funding kept fueling innovations (Darpa grants provided dough for the GUI, the internet, and Google Search), that new generation was characterized by idealism, a hackerish love of building things, and disdain for conventional practices.
That mindset changed not only the course of the computer industry, but the culture of American business. (Before Apple Computer, a CEO wouldn’t dare come to work in anything but a suit.) Denying the existence of that idealism is not only inaccurate, but it conveniently lets the new generation of defense contractors off the hook for their pivot toward deadly materiel.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
PREMIERE: Watch Inside the Madhouse (1887)- The New Award-Winning Story of Nellie Bly aicreatorhouse.substack.com/p/premiere-wat… #AI #video #history
aicreatorhouse.substack.com
PREMIERE: Watch Inside the Madhouse (1887)- The New Award-Winning Story of Nellie Bly
139 years ago today, Nellie Bly entered the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Today, her story premieres around the globe.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Will the AI Bubble Destroy our Retirement? - Mr. Money Mustache www.mrmoneymustache.com/2026/09/25/wil… #AI #fear #optimism #economy
Text Shot: We first covered this lesson right here on MMM, in the 2014 Classic entitled, “Why we are not really all doomed”. And sure enough, twelve years later the timeless lessons therein remain just as true now as they were back then. 

And that lesson is really simple: the world of capitalism is always choppy and prone to wild swings. But if you peek beneath the waves, there are real people in there, doing real work and coming up with real inventions. 

In fact, the very idea of an “economy” or a financial system is just another human invention. If the whole system crashes because we don’t like the numbers we see in there, we can literally make up some new numbers and then get back to work. Which is exactly what we did in 2008 and many times before that, and it seems to have worked just fine. 

Meanwhile, we still have every tool we ever invented to boost our productivity. And our standard of living, and our economic growth, and our possibility of retiring early, all come from…
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Which Localities Can Capture the Benefits of the Data Center Infrastructure Boom? econosseur.rickecon.com/p/which-locali… #AI #DataCenters
This article lays out the framework for how county leaders can capture the substantial benefits of data center development, address legitimate community concerns with transparency, and avoid policy mistakes that leave communities with
neither the revenue nor the resolution of the concerns.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Generative AI News - issue #15 nicolehennig.substack.com/p/generative-a… (the latest issue of my newsletter) #AI #news
Line drawing of person with laptop with floating icons that say Idea, AI, Solution.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Modern Data Centers Use 10x Less Water econosseur.rickecon.com/p/data-center-… #AI #DataCenters
In this article, I dispel some of the misinformation and myths about data center water use and highlight how modern cooling technology has vastly reduced water use. I also highlight the connection between data center water use,
increased energy demands, and the parallel increases in energy efficiency in modern data center designs.
By showing that water resource constraints are no longer a major issue with data center construction, this article shines a light on the remaining fact that electrical resource constraints are the
primary resource constraint for data centers. Despite the increases in data center electrical efficiency, states and countries need to figure out how to provide more power for these critical components of the US IT infrastructure.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system www.anthropic.com/news/claude-di… #AI #Anthropic #biology
Text Shot: After reviewing the pre-print, Feng Zhang, one of the pioneers of CRISPR genome editing and a professor at MIT and the Broad Institute, said:

This is an exciting example of how AI agents can contribute to biological discovery. The identification of RNA-repeat arrays associated with reverse transcriptases is genuinely intriguing and merits further investigation. I hope this work encourages more scientists to explore how AI can support their research.
We gave Claude a prompt to search through a massive database of DNA sequences for interesting new examples of RTs. Our involvement was limited to the initial prompt and the lab work, while Claude agents combed through the database, investigated the distinct RT families, and used their own judgment to identify interesting candidates.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Nellie Bly Weekend Begins Today aicreatorhouse.substack.com/p/nellie-bly-w… #AI #video #storytelling #history
aicreatorhouse.substack.com
Nellie Bly Weekend Begins Today
Four new premieres. One extraordinary story. And it starts with A Nellie Bly Story: Part One.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Opus 5.5: How Close Are We to Automated AI Research? - AI Explained on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9momw… (a lot to think about) #AI #capabilities
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Pulse of the Library 2026 | Clarivate clarivate.com/pulse-of-the-l… #AI #libraries
Text Shot: Clarivate’s Pulse of the Library survey 2026 shows libraries continuing their cautious AI adoption, but with no improvement in confidence over 2025 and few gains in implementation.

At the same time, students and researchers are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools as part of their everyday information-seeking behavior. The gap between how quickly users have moved and how carefully libraries are implementing AI is the central tension of this year’s research.

When investigating the tactics that work, libraries reporting the greatest progress in AI adoption are more likely to have organizational foundations that support its use, including clear governance, defined strategy and investment in staff development.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Meta announces camera-free glasses, dedicated Muse AI gadget, more - 9to5Mac 9to5mac.com/2026/09/23/met… #AI #Meta
Text Shot: Today, Meta announced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio, its first pair of camera-free smart glasses, which starts at $349 and will be available beginning October 13.
The Ray-Ban Meta Audio retains features such as music and podcast playback, calls, and live translation, offering many of the same audio features as Meta’s camera-equipped glasses. They also support Muse, Meta’s recently launched personal AI agent.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it? | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/met… #AI #Meta #Muse
Text Shot: The company says the agent can do things like sending emails, booking travel, lowering bills, filling out forms, creating plans, turning recipe reels into grocery lists, sending party invitations, and making purchases, leveraging Link by Stripe for checkout. The latter offers purchase protections, which could potentially ease consumers’ fears of letting an AI check out on their behalf. (Shopify’s Shop Pay and 1Password integrations are also coming soon.)
Muse’s users can decide which apps and services they want to connect, doing so one at a time, to make the opt-in nature of using Muse more transparent.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Meta's Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/09/21/met… #AI #Meta #Muse
Text Shot: Meta’s latest AI app, Muse, could be the social giant’s next major hit, new data suggests. According to just- released estimates from market intelligence provider Apptopia, Muse’s app on mobile devices has been downloaded more times during its first 12 days on the market than ChatGPT was in the 12 days after its debut. (This data compares the U.S. and Canada markets only.)
Muse also has more daily active users than ChatGPT had at the time, the firm found.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The Overhang - Ethan Mollick www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-overhang #AI #taste #agency
So change is coming no matter how the frontier is paced. It will not happen all at once and it will be uneven, but it is inevitable. Yet inevitable change does not mean the type of change is inevitable. It is increasingly important that we, as a society, develop and share models of AI-human work that enhance, rather than only replace, human labor. And it is equally important that we, as individuals, use Al in ways that enhance, rather than only replace, our own efforts. I don't think there are bright lines we can point to and say Al will never cross them (see above).
But your four advantages are a place to start today.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Anthropic-releases-claude-opus-5-5-beating-fable-5-1-on-key-agentic-benchmarks-at-60-cheaper-api-price venturebeat.com/technology/ant… #AI #Anthropic
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Openai-releases-gpt-6-sol-and-luna-models-slashing-api-costs-50-or-more venturebeat.com/technology/ope… #AI #OpenAI
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Practical AI for Library Workers: From Concerns to Solutions (my online course begins Oct 13, join us!) nicolehennig.com/practical-ai-f… #AI #libraries #education #solutions #benefits
Text Shot: AI is becoming integrated into many of the tools we use, but how we use it and what we choose to use it for is not inevitable. Library workers can help shape the direction society takes with these technologies.
Rather than treating AI as either a miracle or a menace, we’ll take a balanced, hopeful, and hands-on approach. We’ll take inspiration from solutions journalism, an approach that examines how people, communities, and institutions respond to problems and investigates which responses are making meaningful differences.
We’ll go beyond chatbots to explore emerging forms of AI, including vibe-coding, agentic AI, and other ways AI can help people work with information. You’ll leave with practical ideas, adaptable activities, and inspiration for using AI in ways that strengthen human judgment, creativity, accessibility, and learning.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The Future Climate Benefits of AI Are Worth the Risks heatmap.news/ideas/ai-clima… #AI #climate #benefits
Text Shot: Stop treating the frontier AI labs as adversaries and start treating them as infrastructure. The top frontier labs are producing climate-relevant science as a byproduct. That work is currently underrecognized, underfunded, and uncommercialized. Someone should be standing at the end of that pipeline with a checkbook, or at least using these platforms with a focus on commercializable outcomes. This is what’s happening in techbio. We should be doing the same for climate.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Why-im-not-worried-about-ai-killing-us-all-and-you-shouldnt-be-either - Carl Franzen venturebeat.com/technology/why… #AI #humans #doom
Text Shot: My own admittedly non-expert reading of history leads me to conclude that humans are our own worst enemy — not a machine god or even nature itself. And I believe the same will be true with AI: it’s not the AI models you should worry about, it’s how they will be used by other, less scrupulous and more destructive human beings. Perhaps it is not misaligned AI we should be most concerned with, but improperly aligned humanity. 

The worst case scenario I can realistically foresee is that the most advanced technology is hoarded by the powerful to continue exploiting and oppressing the powerless. For that reason, I believe that diffusing AI models as widely and transparently as possible — under international, public frameworks for evaluation and monitoring — is our best bet for staving off any fears of extinction or catastrophic damage caused by other AI itself, whether accidental, incidental in pursuit of its goals, or by design, should it be directed by a human to do so.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
TypeSafe JEV Explained: AI Decisions Without a Chatbot www.theneuron.ai/explainer-arti… #AI #Jev #decisions
theneuron.ai
TypeSafe JEV Explained: AI Decisions Without a Chatbot
TypeSafe’s JEV returns structured decisions with confidence scores instead of chatbot replies. Here’s how it works and where it could fit in AI workflows.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
America is in the wrong AI race with China restofworld.org/2026/america-c… #AI #China
Text Shot: China has recognized that governing AI means governing its deployment, not merely the capabilities of its models
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Introducing Expert Intelligence - Steven Johnson adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/introducing-… #AI #ebooks #GeminiNotebook
To keep things simple, the initial incarnation of Expert Intelligence is built around the existing framework of ebooks.
Working with a long list of top publishers, including Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury, Harper Collins and more, we've made more than 100,000 books from the Google Play bookstore available to use as sources inside of Notebook. You buy the book, and you can add it to any notebook in exactly the way you add normal sources like Docs or PDFs. (You can also read it with all the standard e-book reader features in the Play Books app, though we hope to bring more of those reading experiences to Notebook over time.) Inside of Notebook you can ask questions based on the book content, and get grounded answers with citations back to the original
passages; you can combine different books to create a diverse brain trust inside a
single notebook if you want a "team of rivals" approach; and of course you can generate artifacts like quizzes or audio overviews to deepen your understand
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Claude merges Cowork and chat into one experience www.testingcatalog.com/claude-merges-… #AI #Claude
Text Shot: Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork and standard chat into one Claude experience, ending the need to choose between a quick conversation and a larger delegated task. From the same thread, users can ask a question, hand off extended work, and let Claude continue after their laptop is closed. The rollout is reaching new and existing Pro and Max subscribers across web, desktop, and mobile over the coming weeks. Team and Free plans will follow.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Gemini Notebook adds Voice Chats and Interactive Reports www.testingcatalog.com/gemini-noteboo… #AI #GeminiNotebook
Text Shot: Google is rolling out a redesigned Gemini Notebook with real-time voice conversations, mobile audio recording, and interactive learning overviews aimed at students. The update builds on the service’s role as a single place to gather trusted information, organize thoughts and develop ideas, while adding tools designed to make study sessions more personal and focused.
Real-time conversations are coming soon to the Gemini Notebook mobile app on Android and iOS in nearly 100 languages. Students will be able to speak with a notebook, ask questions, receive step-by-step guidance, and interrupt at any time. Every response will remain grounded in the sources added to that notebook, keeping spoken explanations tied to a user’s own materials.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The future of the human mathematician anakedrhymejam.substack.com/p/the-future-o… #AI #math (No easy answers. An interesting read)
While some of the work is tedious and exhausting, a lot of the work is fun. It's fun to sit with a stack of paper and stare off into the distance trying to solve a problem.
To scribble some notes, day after day, until the pieces start to come together. To meet with a colleague and hash out our ideas and approaches and fill a blackboard with pictures and formulas and sometimes even a theorem and proof. Even the writing and proofreading is its own kind of Type II fun: the rhythm of the detail-oriented work, the realization of a missing step that has to be filled in, the satisfaction of a paper brought to near perfection.
Now there is ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude (and Kimi and Grok) and we're eyeing them uncomfortably, wondering if we want to bring them into the fun, and whether there will be any fun left for us if
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
What-if-ai-data-centers-didnt-need-new-power-plants www.fastcompany.com/91607727/what-… #AI #DataCenters #renewables #solar
Text Shot: A new data center in southwest Texas isn’t connected to the grid—but it also didn’t require building any new power plants. Instead, a startup called Rune used modular technology to plug in directly at a solar farm, running on solar power that would otherwise be wasted.

The company, which just raised a $40 million Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital, says that its model can be replicated at solar plants around the country, giving data centers access to clean power faster and cheaper than building new power capacity.

“We’re the fastest time to compute,” says Rune’s CEO, William Layden. “We don’t need to wait three years, four years, five years for new infrastructure to get built. We’re using what we have today to bring on compute today.”
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The Depth-Psychology of Dario’s Precalculatedly Abortive “AI Slowdown” - Ben Goertzel bengoertzel.substack.com/p/the-depth-ps… #AI #decentralized #prosocial #open
OK, maybe I exaggerate a little. What I see in Dario's dream scenario very clearly, though, is one or two companies fused with a state and its security apparatus, enforcing a chokepoint, and I don't trust elites who believe they know what's best for everyone ... let's just say because I've read some history and met some elites.
The Fable/Mythos episode in June already showed what the chokepoint looks like in practice: one government letter, and a commercially deployed frontier model was switched off for the entire planet within hours. A closed centralized model is a kill-switch, and a kill-switch is one thing what my analysis of the humanity-is-evil scenarios says never to build. It seems like a safe thing to have in principle until you start to look at the specific parties who are going to have their fingers on the button and what their interests are and how they relate to each other.When I look instead at open development by a distributed global community, on a decentralized compute network no party owns or controls - it smells like the internet. It smells like Linux, like the global scientific community, like the global artistic and intellectual community.
It smells like the way things ought to be done. Get everyone in the world thinking about how to make safe beneficial AI, run millions of experiments rather than a handful, let a global brain self-organize out of the diversity of human cultures and perspectives together with a diversity of AI architectures. There are bad guys in there in this vast heady humans, and I think more good than bad. There are no guarantees - but the notion that you get closer to a guarantee by putting Dario, Sam and Donald Trump at the controls seems to me foolish and dangerous. I am fine with all those folks being part of the story - our world is what it is - but I don't want them at the central controls for our whole species andThe target we need to aim for is open, decentralized and prosocially coordinated: a global AGI network with a trust layer - reputation, verifiable commitments, observable behavior - that lets a human-plus-AI supersystem achieve something like cognitive synergy and hold its own homeostasis.
And such a network has far better odds if it's rolled out cooperatively with governments rather than as an underground thing: designed so states can hold stake in it, run nodes, and regulate a compliant edge - sovereignty through participation rather than prohibition - without the permissionless substrate underneath ever becoming capturable.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Some things I believe about AI, until further notice - Andres Guadamuz www.technollama.co.uk/some-things-i-… (similar to my thinking) #AI #opinions #beliefs
Text Shot: As everyone is all of a sudden an AI expert, I decided that I would write what I currently believe about various issues that have now become part of our everyday media lives. Again I repeat that I am not claiming expertise in any of these subjects, as they mostly fall outside of my usual AI and copyright specialist area. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind with this, but I wanted to have a handy reference for future debates.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
125 Tests of the New AI Siri - David Pogie pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of… #AI #Siri #Apple
The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it's a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting.
Also, this is ethical AI: It deceives nobody, puts nobody out of work, and draws 100% of its power from renewable sources.
This Siri can see into your Apple apps:
Mail, Messages, Notes, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Photos, Music, and so on. (Of course, all of this data is locked on the phone. Nobody, not even Apple, has access to it.)
As a result, you can ChatGPT your own life. You can say things like, "What did my
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Who’s Responsible for Irresponsible AI? - Andrew Ng info.deeplearning.ai/whos-responsib… #AI #doom #hype #cybersecurity
Text Shot: I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.
 
First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
AI doom, a guide for the perplexed philosophybear.substack.com/p/ai-doom-a-gu… #AI #doom (interesting long read)
philosophybear.substack.com
AI doom, a guide for the perplexed
The problem with AI discourse is that too much hacky metaphysics is going on, but a clear look shows the risks are real.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Microsoft Wants Data Centers to Blend In to Their Settings datacenterrichness.substack.com/p/microsoft-wa… #AI #DataCenters
Microsoft first implemented this approach, known as biomimicry, in 2022 for a campus in the Netherlands. Based on feedback from the community, the company installed 150 native trees and 2,300 square meters of shrubs, grasses, and groundcover, helping the campus blend in with the local landscape.
This week Microsoft said it will implement biomimicry principles at more than 20 existing data center sites across the United States and in Germany, as well as all new projects in the U.S.
The initiative will combine ecological research and community feedback to map how the environment naturally works, and then design land, water and restoration plans that reflect those systems.Data center in a natural landscape
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Nature has just published a pretty incredible paper. The authors introduce a framework that turns research papers into interactive AI agents. Rather than engaging with a paper only as static text… | Valerio Capraro | 38 comments www.linkedin.com/posts/valerio-… #AI #agents #ResearchPapers
linkedin.com
Nature has just published a pretty incredible paper. The authors introduce a framework that turns research papers into interactive AI agents. Rather than engaging with a paper only as static text… | Valerio Capraro | 38 comments
Nature has just published a pretty incredible paper. The authors introduce a framework that turns research papers into interactive AI agents. Rather than engaging with a paper only as static text, researchers can question its agent, ask it to reproduce an analysis, or apply the paper’s methods to new data. This could make research methods much easier to understand, reproduce, and use. It also opens up a strange possibility: research papers that can, in a sense, talk to one another. The authors demonstrate this by connecting agents derived from different papers so that they can combine their methods and data. Used carefully (and with human scientific judgment still firmly in the loop) this could become a powerful new form of scientific communication. * Full paper in the first comment | 38 comments on LinkedIn
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
How to Design Around Cognitive Offloading drphilippahardman.substack.com/p/how-to-desig… #AI #learning #thinking #InstructionalDesign
Cognitive offloading doesn't automatically happen when learners use AI - it happens when they hand the thinking over to AI.
A research team led by Yiran Cui sat down with 24 university students and went through 120 of their real AI conversations - 688 messages in total
- asking them to explain the reasoning behind every message they'd sent. Each message was then coded for what kind of thinking it showed. When students used Al as a replacement for their own thinking — paste the assignment in, take what comes out - the two highest forms of thinking (judging the quality of ideas, and building on them) appeared exactly zero times. Not rarely: zero, across all 127 of those messages.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
AI in education research: "The Evidence Base Is Nonexistent." No. It's Been Hiding in Plain Sight tinaaustin.substack.com/p/ai-in-educat… #AI #education
But unfortunately, the evidence base is fragmented, heterogeneous, rapidly changing and frequently measuring outcomes that are then interpreted as something else (Just see any of my previous posts).
So of course research exists. But I worry that even with the best research the general public will take whatever they want from it. Take Strömberg et
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss of control incidents www.normaltech.ai/p/the-ai-as-no… #AI #safety #security
normaltech.ai
The AI-as-Normal-Technology view of loss of control incidents
A middle ground between the cybersecurity and AI safety communities
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Everyone Says Datacenter Moratoriums Are Killing the US Buildout. We Mapped All 300 of Them newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/everyone-say… #AI #DataCenters
A moratorium only matters to our forecast if it applies to a specific project, covers the project's parcel, and blocks an approval that the developer still needs. Therefore, determining the actual MW impact requires a parcel-level, project-by-project analysis.In addition, capacity exposed to a moratorium is not capacity delayed by one, a distinction Datacenter Industry Model subscribers will recognize from our early deep dive on the issue. Most restrictions land on projects still years from construction, where schedules were never firm to begin with, and even where a moratorium is the binding constraint the developer can usually relocate, redesign, or challenge the project rather than abandon it. Capacity already under construction, or fully permitted and about to start, is out of reach altogether, since these instruments freeze new applications rather than revoke approvals already granted. That covers all of 2026 and most of 2027.
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Reposted by Nicole Hennig
Heather Froehlich @heatherfro.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Usenet archives are suddenly easy to dig through, an era of the internet nobody really imagined having a search engine for tedium.co/2026/09/14/u...
tedium.co
Usenet’s Back, Baby. (This Time, The Search Works.)
Usenet-Rewind, a new tool for digging into Usenet history, holds much potential for researchers. But seeing your old posts on Usenet is gonna feel weird.
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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
The real AI economy is being built by ordinary people restofworld.org/2026/global-wo… #AI #UseCases #globalExamples #SmallBusiness
Text Shot: The cafe’s launch of samosas illustrates that balance. AI helped validate pricing and gave Mishra confidence that the margins worked. But the decision to introduce the dish — and the recipe itself — came entirely from the team.

Technology has also changed how she spends her workday. Hours once spent writing captions, updating spreadsheets, and calculating margins are now devoted to developing new menu items, organizing community events, and improving the customer experience.

Mishra remains cautious about letting AI reshape the cafe’s character. She rejected proposals for QR code menus, automated ordering screens, and AI-driven customer profiling. Her manager already remembers which regular likes less sugar in their coffee, she said.

“Let humans do that.”

Privacy and the environmental costs of AI rarely influence her day-to-day decisions, largely because she doesn’t believe her small business holds particularly sensitive information. Her concern lies elsewhere: ensuring…
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