Geek Stuff category archive

Writing at Psychology Today Blogs of a scam from two centuries ago, Matthew Facciani sees similarities with today’s online scams.

Secure? That bridge in Brooklyn is still on the market.

Security maven Bruce Schneier points out (emphasis added):

Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there.

Details at the link.

As a matter of fact, let’s make that bleeping stupid.

Hazardous? Per Timothy Cook (no relation to Tim Apple), “New research shows how prolonged AI interactions distort some users’ sense of reality.”

Fostering fantasy? Per Joe Pierre, “When psychosis-proneness meets AI sycophancy, delusional thinking can result.”

The guilty plea.

Mageia v. 9 with the Plasma desktop. The wallpaper is from my collection.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Daniel Marston suggests that something much simpler than the “content” offered by the algorithm keeps us glued to our screens. It’s the mere fact that the “content” keeps changing. He cites a study that seems to bear this out:

In a study by Ando and colleagues (2025), researchers put a tablet in each marmoset’s cage with nine small, silent videos of other primates. When a marmoset tapped one of the videos, that video zoomed in and chattering sounds played. That was all it took. Within a few weeks, most of the marmosets were tapping regularly. Even when the reward was taken away, some of them kept tapping anyway.

Now, if you can tear yourself away from watching online videos of persons cleaning their houses, go read the rest of his article . . . .

Susanna Newsonen takes a look at how “(S)ocial media hijacks your brain’s reward system, making it hard to log off” and how that erodes persons’ attention spans. A snippet:

Social media is engineered to keep us engaged for as long as possible. Every ping, like, and swipe taps into our brain’s reward system, the same one activated by addictive substances like sugar or gambling. These small dopamine hits keep us coming back, often without even realizing how much time or mental energy we’re spending. Psychologists call this intermittent reinforcement, and it’s one of the most powerful tools for habit formation. So it’s not your fault you can’t look away; it’s by design.

Now, go read a book and, remember, “social” media isn’t.

Unbiased and objective? That bridge in Brooklyn is still on the market.

Now even your baggage can have baggage.

Truthful? Pigs. Wings.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Timothy Cook (no relation to Tim Apple) offers a four-step process for tricking AI into revealing its biases and fabrications.

Given the hype and hyperbole about these robotic search engines and given how many browsers and websites are trying to hornswoggle us into letting AI bots do our thinking for us, it is a worthwhile read.

A learning aid? Impediment, actually.

Timothy Cook (no relation to Tim Apple) argues that, rather than helping students learn, AI, with its built-in bias towards certainty (often based on stuff AI makes up out of thin air, I will add), will stunt their education. Specifically, it will inhibit their development of critical thinking skills.

He identifies four specific dangers.

Students lose the ability to sit with “I don’t know.” . . .
They learn intellectual dishonesty as a strategy. . . .
They develop intolerance for complexity. . . .

Most dangerously, they lose their authentic voice. . . .

Follow the link for a detailed discussion of this issue.