A library of snippets
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The AI Agents market is projected to grow from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030, representing a CAGR of 44.8%. As a result, VCs aren’t just excited – they’re recalibrating their entire investment thesis around agentic AI. The pie for software businesses has just grown dramatically, and smart money is betting that agentic AI will create more unicorns than mobile or cloud computing did.
From: The AI Services Revolution: Why VCs Are Betting Big on Agentic AI – VC Cafe.
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Credit card lenders wrote off $46bn in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024, up 50 per cent from the same period in the year prior and the highest level in 14 years
From: US credit card defaults jump to highest level since 2010.
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Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University found that chatting about a conspiracy theory with a large language model (LLM) reduced people’s belief in it by about 20%—even among participants who claimed that their beliefs were important to their identity.
From: Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories | MIT Technology Review.
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Florida residents are set to lose access to Pornhub in the new year amid a battle over state age-verification laws. It will join Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, where the adult site is also blocked. This is because Florida’s age-verification law goes into effect on 1st January 2025. The legislation requires regulated social media platforms to prohibit minors younger than 14 years of age from entering into contracts with social media platforms to become account holders and allows minors who are 14 or 15 years of age to become account holders, but only with the consent of a parent or guardian. The bill also requires regulated commercial entities that knowingly and intentionally publish or distribute material harmful to minors to prohibit access by any person younger than 18 years of age, if their website or application contains a “substantial” portion of material that is harmful to minors.
As to how this must be done, the bill requires the commercial entities to use either an anonymous or standard age verification method. If an anonymous age verification method is used, the verification must be conducted by a nongovernmental, independent third party organized under the laws of a state of the U.S.
Well, if you are anonymous then I do not know who anyone is supposed to know whether you are 15, 18 or 81 so they cannot be what they mean. I am sure that they mean “anonymous so far as the commercial entity is concerned”. In other words, the requirement is for conditional anonymity (or as most people call it, pseudonymity). When you think about it, this must be true, because if I get up to no good online then and break the law in some way, then law enforcement
In the case of Aylo and Pornhub, the company states that it has begun working with the Louisiana government-approved digital wallet, LA Wallet. The wallet holds a digital driver’s license. However, I cannot help but point out that Louisiana’s database was recently hacked. The hackers obtained names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license and learner’s permit numbers, identification card numbers, heights, eye colors, vehicle registration information and handicap placard information. So, it’s only a matter of time before a variety of LA Wallets are created using stolen driver’s license details. This is serious stuff. You stir Pornhub into the mix and the result could be extortion as well as identity theft.
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It is also worth noting that Louisiana’s database has recently been hacked. So, it’s only a matter of time before a variety of LA Wallets are created using stolen driver’s license details.
From: Can Pornhub hold the moral high ground using device-based age verification? | Cybernews.
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He says that “with all the checking and cross-checking going on relating to this engine failure, it could well be that [the] pilots simply forgot to put the landing gear down”.
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When you used a verifiable credential to prove something about yourself, the verifier can know cryptographically: (1) the identifiers for the issuer, (2) the credential hasn’t been tampered with, (3) the credential was issued to you, and (4) the credential hasn’t been revoked. These four checks are important because their establish the fidelity of the data being transferred. They don’t, however, tell them whether they can trust the issuer.
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The Chinese generative AI model “DeepSeek”identifies itself as ChatGPT (!) because, presumably, it was trained using a ot of output from ChatGPT, output which woul dof course have contained hallucinations. Oh dear. As Mike Cook (a research fellow at King’s College London specializing in AI) has pointed out, the practice of training models on outputs from rival AI systems can be “very bad” for model quality. He likens the process of taking photocopies of photocopies, lose more and more information each time and severing the connection to reality,.
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In short, participation is not a verdict on crypto, but rather offers a glimpse into how investment banks weigh the three Rs of deal selection: risk, reward and reputation.
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Snippings