"So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune." -- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy as you age #health #psychology

Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting and preparing a response.

Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research suggests it can.

Concerns about memory and dementia can send aging adults looking for ways to exercise their brain and maintain cognitive function, whether it is solving crossword puzzles or playing a musical instrument. Language learning might not seem like the same kind of brain exercise, but it is a complex activity that engages several mental processes at once.

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Attention is all you have #internet

Attention hijacking

There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us.

Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran. Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads.

Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.

Do you want to know how your colleagues are doing? Too bad, LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment.

Do you want the opinion of strangers on a product? Well those Redditors you wanted to ask are probably just a bunch of LLMs talking to a bunch of Russian trolls now. I hope you didn’t value their opinion too much.

Spymarks, not Watermarks #copyrights #privacy

A watermark is a visible mark embedded in a physical or digital medium to verify authenticity or assert ownership.

A spymark is a hidden signal that makes your work traceable without your knowledge or consent.

Spymarking is sneaking onto the internet

Google SynthID is a spymark that embeds secret hidden signals “imperceptible to humans” (Google’s own words) into images, audio, text, and video. This signal can encode database identifiers that map to your identity. Your user records, full name, IP addresses, date of birth, physical addresses, political party affiliation, and more.

Hister #software #ai

Hister is a private, self hosted search engine for pages you visit and files you keep. It indexes their full contents so you can find information again from the web interface, terminal, API, or an AI assistant connected through MCP.

Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,' new unredacted filings reveal | TechCrunch #ai #copyrights

New unredacted information in the copyright lawsuit The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago reveals an admission that AI scraping was tantamount to theft, and that AI products pose a major threat to publications.

Per the lawsuit, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ AI training practices as “theft,” and OpenAI’s own leadership said its AI models posed an “existential threat” to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. 

The unsealed material also details how the companies allegedly obtained and used that content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets via mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data. 

Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste #software

Microsoft has confirmed that its latest security updates can disrupt Remote Desktop Services, silence some USB audio devices, and break pasting in Excel.

September's Windows patches hardly support Microsoft's insistence that it is sorting out quality. The known issues list suggests there's still work to do.

Reports of problems with Remote Desktop Services (RDS) began circulating on social media shortly after the update, and Microsoft has now acknowledged that, for some users, RDS has indeed been broken across multiple Windows versions, including Windows 11 26H1 and Windows Server 2012.

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Dainius