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Students Won’t Learn to Judge AI by Going to Original Sources timdasey.substack.com/p/students-won… #AI #judgment #intuition

Education loads the brain with knowledge and lets intuition grow through career and life experience. That's no longer enough.
Education systems need to teach intuition too. Much of the 21st-century skills are, in practice, intuitive judgments.
Even if developing intuition isn't the goal, which I am arguing it should be, it can't be ignored. Our unconscious judgments are always on; conscious deliberation is not.
When it is, it is strongly affected by the unconscious.
But honestly most people have no idea what I am talking about. They have been taught that knowledge is built brick by brick and the next step can't go forward until the prerequisites are served. This article explains how the knowledge needed is quite different.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 4h

Gemini 4 Argon begins rolling out in Gemini app and Antigravity, but only if you pay arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/gem… #AI #Google #Gemini

Text Shot: The company has a few new examples of how Argon has helped inside Google, where it has been used by thousands of Googlers. Argon has reportedly been instrumental in making YouTube’s comment system more efficient. Argon identified redundant emoji rendering that, when eliminated, dropped server load by 45 percent. Engineers also turned Gemini 4 loose on the proprietary drone physics simulator used in Project Wing, and the AI found critical bugs that had been in the codebase since 2018. Google also notes that Argon has advanced its robotics program, showing a measurable step increase in embodied reasoning.

Argon is apparently better at solving spatial problems in 3D environments. Credit: Google
For your general AI queries, Gemini 4 Argon will be rolling out today in the Gemini app. However, it’s only going to be available for those on AI Pro ($20/mo) and AI Ultra (starting at $99/mo) plans.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 21h

The AI Doc’s Falsehoods And False Balance www.techdirt.com/2026/04/02/the… #AI #documentaries #reviews

Text Shot: There is a familiar media failure in which opposing viewpoints are presented as equally valid, even when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one side. It’s called Bothsidesism. This false balance phenomenon legitimizes misinformation and undermines public understanding by giving disproportionate weight to baseless claims.
Why bring this up? Because the new AI Doc film is based on it.
The film wants credit for being “balanced” because it assembles a wide range of experts. But putting Prof. Fei-Fei Li, a pioneering computer scientist, next to someone like Eliezer Yudkowsky, an author of a Harry Potter fanfic, is not “balance.”
Once you understand that false equivalence is baked into the film’s storytelling, you understand how misleading and manipulative the documentary is. And it is compounded by a series of falsehoods that go unchallenged and uncorrected.
This review addresses both failures.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Meta unveils new frontier-class AI models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic www.axios.com/2026/10/12/met… #AI #Meta

Text Shot: Meta on Monday unveiled Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, models it says deliver state-of-the-art performance on a range of tasks involving personal and professional agents, memory and coding.

The company posted a range of benchmarks showing the models, previously known by the code-name Watermelon, topping or matching the latest offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Introducing Playground: Create and play custom games blog.google/innovation-and… #AI #Google

Text Shot: Today, we’re introducing Playground, an experimental gaming platform that lets you create, play, and share custom games. Playground lowers the barriers to creation, so bringing game ideas to life can now be as easy as describing it through a few prompts — no coding experience required.
Create your custom game
With Playground’s conversational interface, you can direct the game just by typing what you want to build. Start from a blank canvas, remix starter prompts, or use guided support to shape your concept — and then test it right away. Want to tweak the physics, rewrite the rules, customize the characters, or overhaul the environment? Just ask. You stay in complete control of the creative direction from rough concept to final product.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Claude Motion and Dashboards Explained | 4Geeks 4geeks.com/en/blog/ai-too… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Claude Motion turns your report, chart or idea into a short animated explainer you can edit and download as an MP4, and Claude Dashboards turns a plain-language question about your company's data into a live dashboard. Anthropic put both into beta on October 8, 2026. You don't need to write code or SQL for either one.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

We Do Not Have to Beat AI to Deserve a Future hybridhorizons.substack.com/p/we-do-not-ha… #AI #humans #capabilities

But the statement brings us close to a question that reaches beyond
mathematics. What becomes of us if we are no longer the most capable intelligence in our own civilisation?
I think we deserve a future anyway. I would like us to stop making the defence of that future depend on finding something the machines cannot do.
I have called this human exceptionalism before. The version that concerns me now is the bargain underneath it: we will be valuable for as long as we can show that we are superior. Every impressive machine then becomes a problem for human self-respect, and every limitation a reason to feel better about ourselves for a while.
That is an appalling arrangement. A person's worth should not be waiting on

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

In the world of LLMs, the description is the hyperlink - Mike Caulfield mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/in-the-world… #AI #MEMEX

Doing the little exercise above I can't help but think that descriptions have become hyperlinks. A description that is well designed to the right degree of specificity and abstraction becomes a pointer to a set of related films, ideas, options, diagnoses, possible solutions. To describe and decompose a thing into composable elements is to be able to surface previously unseen connections, the way we dreamed the memex might.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Person, Thing, Robot: A Moral and Legal Ontology for the 21st Century and Beyond direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monog… (open access book) #AI #philosophy

Text Shot: In this book, Gunkel investigates how and why efforts to use existing categories to classify robots fail, argues that “robot” designates an irreducible anomaly in the existing ontology, and formulates an alternative that restructures the ontological order in both moral philosophy and law. Person, Thing, Robot not only addresses the issues that are relevant to students, teachers, and researchers working in the fields of moral philosophy, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), and AI/robot law and policy but it also speaks to controversies that are important to AI researchers, robotics engineers, and computer scientists concerned with the social consequences of their work.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Recreating Adobe: AI and the limits of software copyright www.technollama.co.uk/recreating-ado… #AI #software #copyright

Text Shot: It is too early to tell what will happen here. I would be surprised if software developers such as Adobe allow this development to go unchallenged. My initial impression is that for the most part copyright as it stands tends to allow decompilation and reverse engineering of existing software, specially if clean-room development was used. But I cannot help but feel that the courts may start looking more closely at protection of visual elements. But we can expect more litigation testing whether AI-assisted clean rooms are as clean as advertised.

But regardless of what happens to ArtCraft specifically, we will definitely see more code being decompiled and reverse engineered using AI. The models are just going to improve, so we’re in uncharted territory and the scale of the problem is likely to be huge. But I suspect that software development will never be the same. Heck, it already is not, but things may accelerate.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Claude launches Dashboards and Motion in beta www.testingcatalog.com/claude-launche… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Anthropic has put Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion into beta, expanding Claude’s artifact tools from documents and presentations to live data views and coded animation. Dashboards is available on paid plans, while Motion is limited to Team and Enterprise. Docs, Slides, and Design have also left beta and are now available on every Claude plan, including Free.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Anthropic Says Users Can't Be Needlessly Cruel to Claude www.macrumors.com/2026/10/08/ant… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Anthropic says the abuse rule is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users "repeatedly act cruelly" toward the AI models with "no discernible purpose." The rule does not apply to ordinary user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.

Claude models are already able to end such conversations with persistently abusive users, and ending the conversation will continue to be the main enforcement tool. When Claude ends a chat, no further messages can be sent in that conversation, but other chats are not affected.

Anthropic initially gave Claude the option to end a conversation in August 2025 while researching AI welfare. At the time, Anthropic said it was unsure whether Claude has moral status, but the company wanted low-cost ways to reduce risks to Claude. Anthropic found that Claude Opus 4 had a "robust and consistent aversion to harm." The model demonstrated a preference against dealing with dangerous tasks, apparent distress when…

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The End of Typing? www.kornferry.com/insights/this-… #AI #voice

Text Shot: Voice notes and voice-to-text messaging are now among the most popular ways for younger generations to communicate personally—and, increasingly, in the workplace. New research shows that by 2030, when the oldest members of Gen Alpha enter the workforce, they won’t even need a keyboard: Rather than type prompts, they’ll talk to AI agents; rather than send emails or engage in chats, they’ll share recorded messages with colleagues. 

Researchers have compared the adoption curve of previous tech breakthroughs, such as smartphones and streaming media, to “voice AI.” They’ve found that the new medium is following a similar path to mass acceptance. “The use case for your voice over typing with generative AI is growing rapidly,” says Lewis Cohen, managing director of service development at Korn Ferry’s AMS unit

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

What makes our minds different and where does it come from? tormentnexus.substack.com/p/what-makes-o… #AI #consciousness (interesting questions)

need to be concerned about, and so on. But I want to return to a question I find fascinating (and I hope some of you do too): what is it that makes what Al models do and what human beings do different, and what does that tell is - if anything - about what the future of AI is likely to look like? There's a sort of conventional wisdom that there is something unique about what the human brain and the human mind do, and that this can never be replicated by an Al model. But is that true? And if so, what is this unique ability? And is it as unique as we think it is, or are we just trying to make ourselves feel important?

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Near-daily AI use among US adults has more than doubled in six months epoch.ai/data-insights/… #AI #statistics

We're also tracking intensifying Al use in the broader public. Our latest polling with Ipsos shows the share of US adults who report using Al six to seven days during the previous week rose from 8% in March to 19% in August 2026, while the share reporting use just one day a week fell from 17% to 10%.
Near-daily Al use among US adults has more than doubled in six months

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The New ChatGPT Is More Show Than Tell www.wired.com/story/openai-c… #AI #ChatGPT

Text Shot: On Wednesday, OpenAI unveiled an “Intelligent UI” update for ChatGPT that generates visual, custom elements—when helpful—for answering a user's questions. The company's new experience is powered by its recent GPT-6 model, which rolls out to paid users today and to free users tomorrow.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

A Startup Has a Plan to Make Water From Air Using Data Centers’ Waste Heat www.wired.com/story/startup-… #AI #DataCenters

The materials won Omar Yaghi, the company's founder, the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2025, and Atoco has shown they work in prototypes capable of producing gallons of water per day. What's unique about this iteration of Atoco's technology is what it doesn't require. No grid connection or even electricity is needed to grab water from the air at the microscopic level, nor is it required to in turn wring the water out of the materials in a form useful for humans.

Instead, all that's needed is low-level industrial heat. That, Atoco says, makes them a perfect candidate to hook up with Al data centers, which throw off loads of waste heat as servers churn out everything from math proofs to virtual editors while also often requiring massive amounts of water.
"We were not really thinking of Al data centersiẠạfour or five years ago, says Atoco CEO Samer Taha. But the massive buildout has created an opportunity for the startup that could allow it to get a step closer to its larger goal of ensuring people living in water-stressed regions have control over an increasingly precious resource.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

You-can-now-open-claude-directly-in-google-docs-sheets-and-slides-and-vice-versa-open-and-edit-the-files-in-claude venturebeat.com/technology/you… #AI #GoogleDocs #Anthropic #Claude

Text Shot: Anthropic is putting Claude directly inside some of Google's most popular enterprise productivity apps: Docs, Sheets and Slides. Users can also open these types of files and edit them directly in the Claude web interface.

This makes Anthropic's lineup of AI models potentially formidable alternative to Google’s own built-in AI assistant, Gemini.

The capability is available starting today in public beta across all paid Claude plans, including Enterprise, alongside new Google Docs, Sheets and Slides connectors that allow Claude to create and edit Google files from the Claude interface itself.

Previously, Claude could access Google Workspace content through connectors and perform operations on files in Google Drive, but it did not display and live-edit Docs, Sheets and Slides alongside the conversation in this way. And while third-party Google Workspace add-ons already offered access to Claude models inside Google’s productivity apps, this is Anthropic’s first-party…

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Effective Altruism is about asking questions. It’s being judged by its loudest minority. - Abi Olvera abio.substack.com/p/effective-al… #AI #EA

The movement that funded bednets and cheap

housing is now known for saying Al will kill us

all. Many of its members, even in Al safety,
don't share that view.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Data Centers & the Future of Community Compute www.aspendigital.org/event/future-o… (Watch the recordings of their events) #AI #DataCenters

Text Shot: But what if we had other options? What can compute infrastructure look like if approached as public AI—centering public access, accountability, and sustainability? A growing number of advocates are pushing for meaningful alternatives that expand access to computing power without compromising the public interest.

On September 10th from noon-2pm ET, Aspen Digital hosted a virtual event featuring a variety of builders and thinkers who are reimagining what data centers could be, from tiny distributed networks to public-owned utilities. We discussed the role of librarians, farmers, community advocates, and all of us in creating a more public computing future.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Do The New AI Features in These Familiar Databases Actually Help Researchers? katinamagazine.org/content/articl… #AI #libraries #search

Text Shot: Across all three platforms, the strongest use case for these AI features is early-stage research: learning unfamiliar vocabulary, assessing whether a document is relevant, or locating a useful passage in a long text. Database embedded tools can lower the barrier for novice researchers because they operate in databases libraries already license.

Their limitations are equally clear. None of these tools is well suited for expert, transparent, or reproducible searching.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog (& more news) - Simon Willison simonw.substack.com/p/openai-devda… #AI #Claude

Sonnet 5.5 appears to be almost as good as Opus 5.5 on some coding tasks, including various viral
3D animation tricks.
The most interesting thing about Sonnet 5.5 is that it's now the model used for the free tier on
claude.ai. OpenAl's ChatGPT free tier uses Luna 5.6, which means Anthropic currently have a much more capable free offering.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The Cyber Risk Discourse is Broken www.interconnects.ai/p/the-cyber-ri… #AI #cybersecurity

These together make me come to the conclusion that if you think the latest open-weight models need to be banned to slow the diffusion of cyber risks, you probably also need to make public-facing APIs for the frontier closed-models illegal.
The current stack of safeguards on closed models is stronger than open-weight models, but far from perfect. It is very likely that cyber capabilities of closed models increase much faster than guardrail performance, and a world where open models are banned while closed models continue to progress would be increasing the offense-defense cyber gap.
It will take meaningful time to build mitigations that allow defenders to use strong Al models on their private infrastructure if we remove access to
strong open-weight models.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Yes, AI can watch a dramatic film and fully explain its motives, relationships, and mechanisms. - Mike Caulfield mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/yes-ai-can-w… #AI #capabilities

We live in a time of wonders, and I feel sorry for people without the curiosity to see that
I think this is pretty cool. I don't see how people can't see this as cool.
Al is going to be responsible for a lot of bad things, no doubt. It's going to be responsible for those things for the same reason it does amazing things above: it is extremely capable, of things that critics thought were science fiction a mere four years ago. I think people should be very worried about its adverse effects. But I think people worried about its ill effects might consider learning its capabilities so they can use it for good as well.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

A Day in the Life of Siri AI - David Pogue pogueman.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the… #AI #Siri #Apple

As you can see by the Farmer's Fridge food fail, the new Siri doesn't always get it right.
But overall, it's an enormous leap in efficiency and precision. It's a personal assistant, a second brain, a ChatGPT of your own life.
You just have to will yourself to use it.
After 19 years of performing the unlock-phone/open-app/search routine, you'll need some time to acclimate.
But once you're used to it, you see the future. Suddenly, the screen isn't really that important. Suddenly, you understand why Apple's latest projects are said to be screenless: They're glasses, earbuds, and smart speakers, for example.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

AI ‘godfather’ Yann LeCun has ‘zero concerns’ about human extinction, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is ‘deluded’ | Fortune fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-… #AI #cybersecurity

Text Shot: LeCun isn’t worried “at all” about AI wiping out humanity, and he has “zero concerns” about the recent string of rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI’s agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July. He attributes the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, and says they’re “totally preventable,” a belief also held by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this month called the Hugging Face incident the “responsibility of OpenAI management.”

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Can Jev a super cheap, super fast classifier compete with LLMs for systematic review screening? aarontay.substack.com/p/can-jev-a-su… #AI #Jev

Conclusion
So where does this leave Jev? My experiments are nowhere near enough to establish Jev as a safe automated screener.
But I think they show that this class of model deserves attention. In fact, as many have predicted, leading AI labs have also launched products in this general direction. For example, OpenAl just announced its Decisions API, which uses Luna for structured classification,
routing and action selection.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence blog.google/innovation-and… #AI #Google #Gemini

Text Shot: Today, we’re announcing our new frontier model, Gemini 4 Argon, which is rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through our Fairwind Program. Built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows, Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google. It delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense.
Safely releasing frontier capabilities at this level requires a phased approach. We are actively engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model access while we gradually expand access. We’ll continue to gather feedback from early testers as we iterate on guardrails before making Argon available to developers, enterprises, and consumers as soon as possible.

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Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

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 · 30/09/2026

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 · 30/09/2026

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 · 30/09/2026

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

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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 · 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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