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"hat will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. "

The moral of that story is clear. The spreadsheet was a revolutionary technology when it first appeared in 1978, just as ChatGPT was in 2022. But now it's a routine, integral part of organisation life. The advent of AI "agents" built from GPT-like models looks like following a similar pattern. In turn, the organisations that have absorbed them will also evolve. And then the world may eventually rediscover that famous adage attributed to Marshall McLuhan's colleague John Culkin: "We shape our tools and then the tools shape us."

"This is a broader pattern we're seeing across other fields where LLMs are being deployed. Whether it's coding, writing, design, law, or medicine, the most effective AI users are people who already have deep domain expertise. Expertise isn't obsolete; it's more important than ever-because the value isn't just in producing outputs quickly. It's in being able to vet, steer, and improve those outputs. The future of computer science education isn't about teaching less. It's about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI-to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented. Practically speaking, AI could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for students. When I was in high school, it would take months (if not years) of training in CS before you could create a game or app that was genuinely cool to people that aren't inherently curious and nerdy."

"'Right to be forgotten' laws, giving users - rather than services such as Facebook - control of personal data will save billions of euros and thickets of red tape. So why is Britain resisting?"

"Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was asked to act to take down terrorist-sympathising websites from his search engines during a question and answer session at the literary festival on Saturday. This weekend MPs, including the Labour politician Paul Flynn, called on the company to prevent searches listing sites for groups such as the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab. Schmidt said: "We cannot prima facie identify evil and take it down. We have taken the decision that information if it's legal, even if it's despicable, will be indexed.""

"The mind-reading robot - a PR2 personal robot designed by Willow Garage, equipped with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera - does that by analyzing your body movements. It then searches through its database of various household activities and decides which action will likely follow. "

"To claim Disability Living Allowance or Attendance Allowance in the UK people are being asked to use Internet Explorer 5 or 6 and other systems that are so out of date they are available on less than 2% of computers. If you want to claim online you will need to take a step back to the 1990s and hunt through second hand shops for an old PC that you can power up. "

"If there is nowhere to hide, how can disagreements safely ferment in political life, at work, in relationships? By definition, change disturbs something or annoys someone. And, moving to paranoia, or full awareness, the age-old question arises: who will guard us from the guardians?"

"Some people assume that once quantum computing comes along modern encryption technologies will be outpowered. But experts are starting to posit that hash functions and asymmetric encryption could defend not only against modern computers, but also against quantum attackers from the future."

"DDoS attacks are also becoming more common. Brian Krebs, an independent security researcher, observed earlier this month that the "source code" to the Mirai botnet had been released by a hacker group, "virtually guaranteeing that the internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices""

"Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer," said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar."

"Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."

""The satellite's two-year mission will be to develop 'hack-proof' quantum communications, allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light," Xinhua reported."

"In fact the $60bn multinational has just been scooped by Nutonomy, a small MIT spin-out whose electric self-driving cabs have already started picking up real customers in a Singapore business park. Initially, riders will use Nutonomy's own app to summon hail a Mitsubishi i-Miev or a Renault Zoe, ramping up to a dozen vehicles in the coming months."

"Train the Deep Learning Ahem Detector with two sets of audio files, "a negative sample with clean voice/sound" (minimum 3 minutes) and "a positive one with 'ahem' sounds concatenated" (minimum 10s) and it will detect "ahems" in any voice sample thereafter."

"Facebook will rely on users to report fake news despite evidence that suggests users have a difficult time assessing or identifying fake news. Teens seem to be especially vulnerable to fake news. A recent study by researchers at Stanford found that middle and high school students have a difficult time detecting fake news from real news, or detecting bias in tweets and Facebook statuses."

"Now, researchers from Incapsula have delved into the world of cut-rate DDoS providers, who market their services for $5 a pop on the website Fiverr. The DDoSers figleaf their offerings by calling them "stress testers" that website owners can use to determine whether their sites are configured to handle lots of traffic, but as the Incapsula team found, most will cheerfully attack sites other than your own (though one vendor said he wouldn't attack "government state websites, hospitals"). "

"Meanwhile, Goel plans on bringing the chatbot to more schools and classes. While he doesn't see Jill completely replacing professors and assistants, he thinks giving more students the opportunity for one-on-one interactions - even if with an AI - will help keep them engaged in the coursework."

"Bruce Schneier makes the point that if the Russian state is behind the DNC hacks, there's no reason to expect that its attacks on the US political system will end there. Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election). "