Snippings

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For the longest time, Dave Birch has rightly argued that IS_A_PERSON will be the most important verifiable credential, most likely issued by my bank.

From: Personhood Credentials can restore privacy, the quiet progress of age estimation, and giving Decentralised Identity a SLAP.

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Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems (χ2(2, N = 16,340) = 247.04, p < 0.0001). We found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.

From: AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably | Scientific Reports.

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An AI chatbot called “FungiFriend” was added to a popular mushroom identification Facebook group Tuesday. It then told users there how to “sauté in butter” a potentially dangerous mushroom, signaling again the high level of risk that AI chatbots and tools pose to people who forage for mushrooms.

From: AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom.

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Indeed, data from 2022 indicated that the dollar was on one side of the trade for over 97 percent, 95 percent, 94 percent, and 88 percent of Indian rupee, Brazilian real, Chinese renminbi, and South African rand foreign exchange transactions, respectively.8 Data also indicated that in 2022, globally, the dollar was on one side of the trade for almost 90 percent of all foreign exchange transactions.9 Currency pairs involving the dollar are generally far more liquid and thus less costly to exchange than emerging market currency pairs. Indeed, no well-functioning markets for directly exchanging many emerging market currency pairs even exist. The dollar is therefore oftentimes used to facilitate exchanges between emerging market currencies.10 As a result, even when cross-border trade is invoiced in a local currency, the dollar may ultimately play a role in facilitating that transaction.

From: The Difficult Realities of the BRICS’ Dedollarization Efforts—and the Renminbi’s Role – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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If I have a laundry token for washing my clothes, that’s not a security. But if I have a set of 10 laundry tokens and the laundromats are to be developed and those are offered to me as something I can use for the future and I’m buying them because I can sell them to next year’s incoming class, that’s a security. What we find in the regulatory world is that the use of a laundry token evolves over time. The use can evolve toward or away from a security.

From: SEC v Coinbase—the Black Knight, Bosses, and the Limits of Regulation by Enforcement.

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Self-custody is the big winner. The decision holds that software that manages the keys associated with digital assets and that connects users to places where they can buy and sell digital assets for a fee is not subject to US securities laws. Coupled with the implicit concession that bitcoin and fully reserved stablecoin assets are not securities, the decision regarding self-custody solutions provides a road map for the construction of a digital asset ecosystem that the U.S. Securities laws will not reach

From: SEC v Coinbase—the Black Knight, Bosses, and the Limits of Regulation by Enforcement.

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A team at Google DeepMind that studies something called mechanistic interpretability has been working on new ways to let us peer under the hood. At the end of July, it released Gemma Scope, a tool to help researchers understand what is happening when AI is generating an output. The hope is that if we have a better understanding of what is happening inside an AI model, we’ll be able to control its outputs more effectively, leading to better AI systems in the future.

“I want to be able to look inside a model and see if it’s being deceptive,” says Neel Nanda, who runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind. “It seems like being able to read a model’s mind should help.”

From: Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind” | MIT Technology Review.

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Block is also shutting down TBD, a Bitcoin-focused arm of the business that previously set out to build a decentralized internet, dubbed “Web5.” These cuts will free up the company to invest in Bitcoin mining and its crypto wallet.

From: Block scales back TIDAL investment and shutters TBD in favor of Bitcoin mining | TechCrunch.

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Researchers gave successive versions of a large language model information produced by previous generations of the AI — and observed rapid collapse.

From: AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense.

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Reeves will demand that companies including Meta, TikTok, BT and EE update ministers about progress on fraud prevention before March, with the veiled threat of further action if they fail to act.

From: Reeves seeks reform of UK consumer redress in financial services sector.

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