In the U.S. the baseline assumption is that "Al is rotting our brains," and "Al is destroying our critical thinking skills. However, in China, the conversation is about "AI-Human Intelligence Synergy." Hi, I'm the creator of the critical thinking bot, an Al chatbot that clarifies, not replaces, your thinking. The difference between the U.S. and China's approach is all about the educational foundations BEFORE Al is introduced.

Shae O. Omonijo (@iamshaeo) on Threads www.threads.com/@iamshaeo/post… (a thread worth following) #AI #CriticalThinking #US #China

The Role of a New Machine An old book puts today's new technology in perspective

The Role of a New Machine - Dan Cohen newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-ro… #AI #computing #history #TechnologicalChange

Text Shot: The same underlying technology produces dramatically different cognitive effects depending on how it’s implemented. AI can make what you produce better while making you worse at producing it. Or it can genuinely make you better. Which one happens depends on design, not on AI itself. This nuance should shape policy, product design, and individual behavior. The debate about “should we use AI?” is much less important than the question of how the interventions are designed and how the technology is used. Sounds like a no-brainer, but public perception is still stuck at “is AI good or bad?” That’s the most important insight across the entire literature.

What the Studies Say About How AI Affects Your Brain: A (Very Big) Compilation www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/what-the-stu… #AI #thinking

Key Questions on Energy and AI – Analysis - IEA Key Questions on Energy and AI - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

Key Questions on Energy and AI – Analysis - IEA www.iea.org/reports/key-qu… (worth reading the executive summary) #AI #DataCenters #energy

Unlike subscription services such as DirecTV and Dish Network, "free-to-air" satellite TV broadcasts are unencrypted and can be received by anyone with a dish and receiver— no subscription required. Because the signals are open, users can also capture and store the data they carry, rather than simply watching it live. Tech-savvy people learned that they could use a digital video broadcasting (DVB) card—a piece of hardware that connects to a computer and tunes into satellite frequencies —to transform a personal computer into a satellite receiver. This way, they could watch and store media locally as well as download data from dedicated channels.

Toosheh doesn't provide internet access, but rather delivers curated data through satellite technology. The fundamental distinction lies in the way users interact with the system. Unlike traditional internet services, where you type a request into your browser and receive data in response, Toosheh operates more like a combination of radio and television, presenting information in a magazine-like format. Users don't make requests; instead, they receive 1 to 5 gigabytes of prepackaged, carefully selected data.

During this year's internet blackout, we distributed official statements from Iranian opposition leader Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and the U.S. government. We provided first-aid tutorials for medics and injured protesters. We sent uncensored news reports from BBC Persian, Iran International, Iran Wire, VOA Farsi, and others. We also shared critical software packages including anticensorship and antisurveillance tools, along with how-to guides to help people securely connect to Starlink satellite terminals, allowing them to stay protected and anonymous as they sent their own communications.

Inside the Stealth Satellite Lifeline Beating Iran’s Internet Blackout spectrum.ieee.org/iran-internet-… #InternetAccess #Iran #censorship #solutions

LOL. (At our house we’ve just been watching the original Batman shows from the 60s).

Text Shot: "The ocean is really unlimited in terms of how much energy is available," he said. "It will really be the cheapest energy on the planet." He likened Panthalassa's test model, the Ocean-2, to a floating hydroelectric dam. "As it goes up and down with the waves, it causes water that's in that tube to be forced up into the top. Once it's in the ball, the water is forced through a turbine. The turbine spins, and that's what makes the electricity."

Using the ocean to power data centers www.cbsnews.com/news/using-wav… #AI #DataCenters

Text Shot: The change in traffic sources isn’t the only impact. AI visitors are converting better, engaging at higher rates, spending more time on sites, and driving higher revenue per visit, the data shows, often reversing trends from only a year ago, when regular customers were worth more to retailers.

AI traffic to US retailers rose 393% in Q1, and it's boosting their revenue too | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/ai-… #AI #shopping

I think that conventional wisdom is wrong. We are mistaking the (frankly, predictable) backlash of right-wing populists — and left-wing populists, for that matter — as the new way forward. We are fixated on watching the losers of the globalization game try to restore the old world, but it is not coming back. Trump and MAGA explicitly frame "Making America Great Again" as returning to the 1950s, the heyday of the post-World War II boom. They want to return to that age when the white working-class was empowered and thriving, when America dominated manufacturing and most other leading industries in the world. And which constituency is most likely to back MAGA in America and the equivalent right-wing populists in Europe? The Baby Boomers and old people, in general. They are the ones trying to restore their supposedly idyllic past — the period when they were the center of the universe. The world isn't going back to that lost world. Despite the machinations of Boomer Trump (age 79) and

The Long Arc of Human History is Toward Planetary Thinking - Peter Leyden peterleyden.substack.com/p/the-long-arc… #AI #history #future #globalization #politics

Text Shot: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly built less by changing model weights than by reorganizing the runtime around them. Capabilities that earlier systems expected the model to recover internally are now externalized into memory stores, reusable skills, interaction protocols, and the surrounding harness that makes these modules reliable in practice. This paper reviews that shift through the lens of externalization. Drawing on the idea of cognitive artifacts, we argue that agent infrastructure matters not merely because it adds auxiliary components, but because it transforms hard cognitive burdens into forms that the model can solve more reliably. Under this view, memory externalizes state across time, skills externalize procedural expertise, protocols externalize interaction structure, and harness engineering serves as the unification layer that coordinates them into governed execution. We trace a historical progression from weights to context to harness,…

Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering arxiv.org/abs/2604.08224… #AI #HarnessEngineering

There is a fast-spreading new idea that data centers cause a unique harm: "infrasound." Environmentalists may remember this as a pseudoscientific idea promoted by some fossil fuel interests to scare people about wind turbines in the 2010s. Infrasound is now the topic of what looks like the single most popular piece of media made about data centers in 2026 so far: the video Datacenters Behaving Like Accoustic Weapons by the popular YouTuber Benn Jordan. This video is a complete moment-to-moment disaster, and has received no meaningful pushback, so I will be the first. Even if you have no interest in either data centers or infrasound, I think this video is an amazing sociological example of how highbrow misinformation is developed and rapidly spread. I found the experience of unpacking it jaw-dropping.

Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake - Andy Masley blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-… #AI #DataCenters #disinformation

"...most people complain about universities forcing AI on people, but that’s generally not the case." Part 2 of an interview with Bryan Alexander

"...most people complain about universities forcing AI on people, but that’s generally not the case." aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/most-people-… (interesting interview with Bryan Alexander) #AI #higherEducation

Text Shot: Google is testing a new Agent tab in Gemini Enterprise, hinting at an upcoming agentic workflow with task management features ahead of Google I/O. This may point to Google's upcoming desktop app.

Google develops its own desktop Agent to compete with Cowork www.testingcatalog.com/google-develop… #AI #Google #agents

Text Shot: Anthropic has announced the launch of Claude Design, a new platform that brings advanced AI-powered design capabilities to its users. This release targets professionals such as designers, product managers, marketers, and founders, as well as teams seeking to streamline their visual design workflows. Claude Design is immediately available in research preview to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, with features being rolled out gradually.

Anthropic launches Claude Design AI tool for paid plans www.testingcatalog.com/anthropic-laun… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts, break that up into separate documents for each of the models and then construct a Git history of those files over time with fake commit dates representing the publication dates of each updated prompt—here’s the prompt I used with Claude Code for the web. Here is the git diff between Opus 4.6 and 4.7. These are my own highlights extracted from that diff—in all cases text in bold is my emphasis:

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - Simon Willison simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/op… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Utilities and regulators can protect existing customers with a simple safeguard, giving teeth to vague qualitative pledges: Sell power to new data centers only under ​“take or pay” contracts that repay the entire electricity investment regardless. Those agreements should be backed by robust bonds or insurance, priced by capital-market risk experts (not by developers), to ensure that if an AI venture collapses, losses fall on the developer, not on households and small businesses. If markets, and not mandates, determine the outcome, the conclusion is already clear. Gas, coal, and nuclear are too slow, too costly, and too risky to anchor the next wave of U.S. power demand. The only technologies that scale quickly enough, cheaply enough, and reliably enough for AI already dominate global additions. Policy will now decide whether Americans will enable the new energy system or protect the old — and whether they’ll pay for stranded gas plants or profit from the cheapest and most…

AI: Does not compute www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-… #AI #DataCenters #renewables #solar #batteries #wind

Text Shot: Let me finally put my cards on the table. I would describe myself as on the left wing, and I’m broadly agnostic about the impact of AI. Like the boring fence-sitter I am, I think it will have a mix of positive and negative effects. In general, I’m unconvinced by the pro-copyright and human-soul-related anti-AI arguments, or by the idea that AI is inherently right-wing, but I’m troubled by the environmental impact and the impact on jobs (which in my view are more classically left-wing positions). Still, I’m curious what will happen when the left-wing flavor of anti-AI rhetoric disappears, which I think it will (as I said at the start, anti-AI sentiment is actually pretty bipartisan). When people start making explicitly right-wing anti-AI arguments, will that cause the left-wing to move a little bit towards supporting AI? Or will right-wing institutions continue to explicitly support AI, allowing anti-AI sentiment to become a wedge issue that the left-wing can exploit to pry…

Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments www.seangoedecke.com/many-anti-ai-a… #AI #rightWing #leftWing

Revision of human prose I initially wrote this to solve a problem with LLM prose. As I crafted the prompt and tested it, I did think more and more about what use it might have to someone looking to figure out a problem they are having with their own writing. In this mode I don't think of it as an automatic paragraph generator, but as something that might open a stuck writer's eyes to a range of possibilities they hadn't seen, which they could then take in places and reintegrate into their work.

Introducing /jamesian, a Claude skill that helps you de-homogenize LLM prose mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/introducing-… #AI #writing

Text Shot: LinkedIn’s Blake Lawit, the chief global affairs and legal officer of the Microsoft-owned professional networking site, confirmed in an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week that the company’s data shows a decline in hiring of around 20% since 2022. However, he pushed back at the idea that AI was to blame. “At LinkedIn… we have an economic graph which is over a billion members. We’ve got companies, jobs, skills. It’s really an amazing real-time view of what’s happening in the labor market. And we’ve looked — because everyone wants to know the answer to this question: Is AI impacting jobs right now? We’ve looked and, honestly, we haven’t seen it,” he said during his interview. Instead, the executive suggested that the decline in hiring was more closely tied to a rise in interest rates.

LinkedIn data shows AI isn't to blame for hiring decline... yet | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/lin… #AI #jobs

Text Shot: Today, we’re introducing GPT‑Rosalind, our frontier reasoning model built to support research across biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine. The life sciences model series is optimized for scientific workflows, combining improved tool use with deeper understanding across chemistry, protein engineering, and genomics.

Introducing GPT-Rosalind for life sciences research openai.com/index/introduc… #AI #OpenAI #science

Text Shot: Ultimately, Opus 4.7 is a model defined by its discipline. In a market where models are often incentivized to be "helpful" to a fault—sometimes hallucinating answers to please the user—Opus 4.7 marks a return to rigor. By allowing users to control effort, set budgets, and verify outputs, Anthropic is moving closer to the goal of a truly autonomous digital labor force. For the engineering teams at Replit, Notion, and beyond, the shift from "watching the AI work" to "managing the AI's results" has officially begun.

Anthropic-releases-claude-opus-4-7-narrowly-retaking-lead-for-most-powerful-generally-available-llm venturebeat.com/technology/ant… #AI #Claude

Text Shot: Extending Codex beyond coding With background computer use, Codex can now use all of the apps on your computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor. Multiple agents can work on your Mac in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps. For developers, this is helpful for iterating on frontend changes, testing apps, or working in apps that don’t expose an API.

Codex for (almost) everything openai.com/index/codex-fo… #AI #OpenAI #Codex

Text Shot: The introduction of "Routines" represents a significant architectural evolution for Claude Code. Previously, automation was often tied to the user's local hardware or manually managed infrastructure. Routines move this execution to Anthropic’s web infrastructure, decoupling progress from the user's local machine. This means a critical task—such as a nightly triage of bugs from a Linear backlog—can run at 2:00 AM without the developer's laptop being open.

We-tested-anthropics-redesigned-claude-code-desktop-app-and-routines-heres-what-enterprises-should-know venturebeat.com/orchestration/… #AI #ClaudeCode #Routines

I'm going to argue here that 1) The comparisons people make with training are often silly and misleading, and 2) When you make fair comparisons between training AI models and creating other products, the cost of training does not look unreasonably large at all. The way this is talked about often involves comparisons that would make literally any popular consumer product look ridiculous and wasteful. I think these comparisons are obviously goofy, and if I make more reasonable comparisons while keeping the numbers the same, you will see that training Al models is not some unique environmental catastrophe, and actually just blends into all the other ways society uses energy normally.

Training AI models doesn't emit that much - Andy Masley blog.andymasley.com/p/training-ai-… #AI #training #environment

Text Shot: One of the platform’s most valuable strengths is its ability to save researchers time by streamlining the literature discovery process. Complex connections that might take an extensive amount of time to uncover manually become visible in seconds. At the same time, its network-driven approach generates deeper insights, helping researchers identify trends, gaps, and influential works that might otherwise be overlooked.

Streamlining Your Literature Review Workflow with ResearchRabbit - Choice 360 www.choice360.org/libtech-insigh… #AI #LiteratureReviews

If this is right, then AI won't just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them. The same economic forces that moved 40% of the American workforce off farms and into factories and offices will move workers out of automatable commodity production and into what I'1l call the relational sector. By this I mean the human- intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself. The economics of scarcity won't disappear, it'll just relocate.!

What will be scarce? aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-be… (future of work) #AI #jobs #work #economics

Each transition produced the same dynamic: new cognitive tools changed how we think, with old capacities fading and new ones emerging. The people living through those transitions rarely saw clearly what was being gained to replace what was being lost. The new capacities only became visible after they'd already taken hold.

We're developing new cognitive abilities. We just don't know what they are yet. cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/were-develop… #AI #thinking

Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part III Most of us do not contribute to human knowledge—AI just made it obvious

Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part III www.popularbydesign.org/p/academics-ne… (many good ideas) #AI #research #academics #socialSciences #education

Reframing the AI narrative: a call for social sciences and public interest technology | Anne Marie Todd Pleased to share the publication of my article: “Reframing the AI narrative: A call for social sciences and public interest technology.” I argue that social scientists must engage in the conversation about AI and other technologies. I call on higher education leaders in the social sciences to make space for public interest technology to support our students to better design, engage with, and govern new technologies for the public good. https://lnkd.in/gnDr3B7U

Reframing the AI narrative: a call for social sciences and public interest technology | Anne Marie Todd www.linkedin.com/posts/anne-mar… #AI #SocialSciences

Text Shot: Students are also becoming more cautious about how AI should be used in schools, and employees are increasingly uncertain about its impact in the workplace. Even so, most Gen Zers acknowledge that AI will be a critical part of their academic and professional futures.

Walton Family Foundation-Gallup Gen Z Research Hub www.gallup.com/analytics/6516… #AI #statistics #research #use