Who Knew? Remote Workers Are Happier Than Cube Laborers
June 6, 2025
To some of us, these findings come as no surprise. The Farmingdale Observer reports, “Scientists Have Been Studying Remote Work for Four Years and Have Reached a Very Clear Conclusion: ‘Working from Home Makes Us Happier’.” Nestled in our own environment, no commuting, comfy clothes—what’s not to like? In case anyone remains unconvinced, researchers at the University of South Australia spent four years studying the effects of working from home. Writer Bob Rubila tells us:
“An Australian study, conducted over four years and starting before the pandemic, has come up with some enlightening conclusions about the impact of working from home. The researchers are unequivocal: this flexibility significantly improves the well-being and happiness of employees, transforming our relationship with work. … Their study, which was unique in that it began before the health crisis, tracked changes in the well-being of Australian workers over a four-year period, offering a unique perspective on the long-term effects of teleworking. The conclusions of this large-scale research highlight that, despite the sometimes contradictory data inherent in the complexity of the subject, offering employees the flexibility to choose to work from home has significant benefits for their physical and mental health.”
Specifically, researchers note remote workers get more sleep, eat better, and have more time for leisure and family activities. The study also contradicts the common fear that working from home means lower productivity. Quite the opposite, it found. As for concerns over losing in-person contact with colleagues, we learn:
“Concerns remain about the impact on team cohesion, social ties at work, and promotion opportunities. Although the connection between colleagues is more difficult to reproduce at a distance, the study tempers these fears by emphasizing the stability, and even improvement, in performance.”
That is a bit of a hedge. On balance, though, remote work seems to be a net positive. An important caveat: The findings are considerably less rosy if working from home was imposed by, say, a pandemic lock-down. Though not all jobs lend themselves to remote work, the researchers assert flexibility is key. The more one’s work situation is tailored to one’s needs and lifestyle, the happier and more productive one will be.
Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2025
YouTube Reveals the Popularity Winners
June 6, 2025
No AI, just a dinobaby and his itty bitty computer.
Another big technology outfit reports what is popular on its own distribution system. The trusted outfit knows that it controls the information flow for many Googlers. Google pulls the strings.
When I read “Weekly Top Podcast Shows,” I asked myself, “Are these data audited?” And, “Do these data match up to what Google actually pays the people who make these programs?”
I was not the only person asking questions about the much loved, alleged monopoly. The estimable New York Times wondered about some programs missing from the Top 100 videos (podcasts) on Google’s YouTube. Mediaite pointed out:
The rankings, based on U.S. watch time, will update every Wednesday and exclude shorts, clips and any content not tagged as a podcast by creators.
My reaction to the listing is that Google wants to make darned sure that it controls the information flow about what is getting views on its platform. Presumably some non-dinobaby will compare the popularity listings to other lists, possibly the misfiring Apple’s list. Maybe an enthusiast will scrape the “popular” listings on the independent podcast players? Perhaps a research firm will figure out how to capture views like the now archaic logs favored decades ago by certain research firms.
Several observations:
- Google owns the platform. Google controls the data. Google controls what’s left up and what’s taken down? Google is not known for making its click data just a click away. Therefore, the listing is an example of information control and shaping.
- Advertisers, take note. Now you can purchase air time on the programs that matter.
- Creators who become dependent on YouTube for revenue are slowly being herded into the 21st century’s version of the Hollywood business model from the 1940s. A failure to conform means that the money stream could be reduced or just cut off. That will keep the sheep together in my opinion.
- As search morphs, Google is putting on its thinking cap in order to find ways to keep that revenue stream healthy and hopefully growing.
But I trust Google, don’t you? Joe Rogan does.
Stephen E Arnold, June 6, 2025
AI: The Ultimate Intelligence Phaser. Zap. You Are Now Dumber Than Before the Zap
June 6, 2025
We need smart, genuine, and kind people so we can retain the positive aspects of humanity and move forward to a better future. It might be hard to connect the previous statement with a YouTube math channel, but it won’t be after you read BoingBoing’s story: “Popular Math YouTuber 3Blue1Brown Victimized By Malicious And Stupid AI Bots.”
We know that AI bots have consumed YouTube and are battling for domination of not only the video sharing platform, but all social media. Unfortunately these automated bots flagged a respected mathematics channel 3Blue1Brown, who makes awesome math animations and explanations. The 3Blue1Brown team makes math easier to understand for the rest of us dunderheads. 3Blue1Brown was hit with a strike. Grant Sanderson, the channel’s creator, said:
“I learned yesterday the video I made in 2017 explaining how Bitcoin works was taken down, and my channel received a copyright strike (despite it being 100% my own content). The request seems to have been issued by a company chainpatrol, on behalf of Arbitrum, whose website says they "makes use of advanced LLM scanning" for "Brand Protection for Leading Web3 Companies" I could be wrong, but it sounds like there’s a decent chance this means some bot managed to convince YouTube’s bots that some re-upload of that video (of which there has been an incessant onslaught) was the original, and successfully issue the takedown and copyright strike request. It’s naturally a little worrying that it should be possible to use these tools to issue fake takedown requests, considering that it only takes 3 to delete an entire channel.”
Can we do a collective EEP?!
ChainPatrol.io is a notorious YouTube AI tool that patrols the platform. It “trolls” channels that make original content and hits them with “guilty until proven innocent” tags. It’s known for doing the opposite of this:
“ChainPatrol.io, the company whose system initiated the takedown, claims its "threat detection system makes use of advanced LLM scanning, image recognition, and proprietary models to detect brand impersonation and malicious actors targeting your organization.”
ChainPatol.io responded with a generic answer:
“Hello! This was a false positive in our systems at @ChainPatrol. We are retracting the takedown request, and will conduct a full post-mortem to ensure this does not happen again. We have been combatting a huge volume of fake YouTube videos that are attempting to steal user funds. Unfortunately, in our mission to protect users from scams, false positives (very) occasionally slip through. We are actively working to reduce how often this happens, because it’s never our intent to flag legitimate videos. We’re very sorry about this! Will keep you posted on the takedown retraction.”
Helpful. Meanwhile Grant Sanderson and his fans have given ChainPatrol.io a digital cold shoulder.
Whitney Grace, June 6, 2025
Lawyers Versus Lawyers: We Need a Spy Versus Spy Cartoon Now
June 5, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
Rupert Murdoch, a media tycoon with some alleged telephone intercept activity, owns a number of “real” news outfits. One of these published “What Is Big Tech Trying to Hide? Amazon, Apple, Google Are All Being Accused of Abusing Legal Privilege in Battles to Strip Away Their Power.” As a dinobaby in rural Kentucky, I have absolutely no idea if the information in the write up is spot on, close enough for horseshoes, or dead solid slam dunk in the information game.
What’s interesting is that the US legal system is getting quite a bit of coverage. Recently a judge in a fly over state found herself in handcuffs. Grousing about biased and unfair judges pops up in social media posts. One of my contacts in Manhattan told me that some judges have been receiving communications implying kinetic action.
Yep, lawyers.
Now the story about US big technology companies using the US legal system in a way that directly benefits these firms reveals “news” that I found mildly amusing. In rural Kentucky, when one gets in trouble or receives a call from law enforcement about a wayward sibling, the first action is to call one of the outstanding legal professionals who advertise in direct mail blasts on the six pm news and put memorable telephone numbers on the sides of the mostly empty bus vehicles that slowly prowl the pot-holed streets.
The purpose of the legal system is to get paid to represent the client. The client pays money or here in rural Kentucky a working pinball machine was accepted as payment by my former, deceased, and dearly beloved attorney. You get the idea: Pay money, get professional services. The understanding in my dealings with legal professionals is that the lawyers listen to their paying customers, discuss options among themselves or here in rural Kentucky with a horse in their barn, and formulate arguments to present their clients’ sides of cases or matters.
Obviously a person with money wants attorneys who [a] want compensation, [b] want to allow the client to prevail in a legal dust up, and [c] push back but come to accept their clients’ positions.
So now the Wall Street Journal reveals that the US legal system works in a transparent, predictable, and straightforward way.
My view of the legal problems the US technology firms face is that these innovative firms rode the wave their products and services created among millions of people. As a person who has been involved in successful start ups, I know how the surprise, thrill, and opportunities become the drivers of business decisions. Most of the high technology start ups fail. The survivors believe their intelligence, decision making, and charisma made success happen. That’s a cultural characteristic of what I call the Sillycon Valley way. (I know about this first hand because I lived in Berkeley and experienced the carnival ride of a technological winner.)
Without exposure to how technologies like “online” work, it was and to some extent still difficult to comprehend the potential impacts of the shift from media anchored in non digital ecosystems to the there is not there there hot house of a successful technology. Therefore, neither the “users” of the technology recognized the impact of consumerizing the most successful technologies nor the regulators could understand what was changing on a daily and sometimes hourly cadence. Even those involved at a fast-growing high technology company had no idea that the fizz of winning would override ethical and moral considerations.
Therefore:
- Not really news
- Standard operating procedure for big technology trials since the MSFT anti-trust matter
- The US ethical fabric plus the invincibility and super hero mindsets maps the future of legal dust ups in my opinion.
Net net: Sigh. William James’s quantum energy is definitely not buzzing.
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2025
India: Fair Use Can Squeeze YouTubers
June 5, 2025
Asian News International (ANI) seems to be leveraging the vagueness of India’s fair-use definition with YouTube’s draconian policies to hold content creators over a barrel. The Reporters’ Collective declares, “ANI Finds Business Niche in Copyright Claims Against YouTubers.” Writer Ayushi Kar recounts the story of Sumit, a content creator ANI accused of copyright infringement. The news agency reported more than three violations at once, a move that triggered an automatic takedown of those videos. Worse, it gave Sumit just a week to make good with ANI or lose his channel for good. To save his livelihood, he forked over between 1,500,000 and 1,800,000 rupees (about $17,600 – $21,100) for a one-year access license. We learn:
“Sumit isn’t the lone guy facing the aggressive copyright claims of ANI, which has adopted a new strategy to punitively leverage YouTube’s copyright policies in India to generate revenue. Using the death clause in YouTube policy and India’s vague provisions for fair use of copyrighted material, ANI is effectively forcing YouTube creators to buy expensive year-long licenses. The agency’s approach is to negotiate pricey licensing deals with YouTubers, including several who are strong critics of the BJP, even as YouTube holds a sword over the content producer’s channel for multiple claims of copyright violation.”
See the write-up for more examples of content creators who went through an ANI shake down. Kar continues:
“While ANI might be following a business it understands to be legal and fair, the episode has raised larger concern about copyright laws and the fair use rights in India by content producers who are worried about being squeezed out of their livelihoods – sometimes wiping out years of labor to build a community – between YouTube’s policies and copyright owners willingness to play hardball.”
What a cute tactic. Will it come to the US? Is it already here? YouTubers, feel free to comment. There is something special about India’s laws, though, that might make this scheme especially profitable there. Kar tells us:
“India’s Copyright Act 1957 allows … use of copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news, reporting and many more. In practice, there is a severe lack of specificity in law and regulations about how fair use doctrine is to be practiced.”
That means the courts decide what fair use means case by case. Bringing one’s case to court is, of course, expensive and time consuming, and victory is far from assured. It is no wonder content creators feel they must pay up. It would be a shame if something happened to that channel.
Cynthia Murrell, June 5, 2025
Can You Detox When Everyone Is Addicted to Online?
June 5, 2025
Digital detox has been a thing for a while and it’s where you go off the grid. No phone. No computer. No Internet. The Internet and mobile devices are so ingrained into our consciousness that it’s a reflex to check for messages, social media, etc. Amanda Kooser at CNet when an entire day without the Internet and describes what happens in: “24 Hours Without Internet: I Tried This Digital Detox and Thrived.”
Kooser set some ground rules to ensure her digital detox would be successful. She unplugged her Internet router to disable WiFi and connected Internet. She enabled Focus Mode on all her devices to silence them.
She started her day by waking up with a non-phone alarm clock, read a book, then headed to work without the use of Google maps. She got lost but used good, old-fashioned directions to arrive at her destination. Kooser also watched TV with an antenna instead of streaming her shows. She learned that antenna TV sucks.
Here’s her overall opinion:
“The best part of having no internet for the day was the pause on micro-interruptions — all the little things that steal attention: neighborhood alerts, store sales and emails that need to be deleted. I enjoyed the quiet so much that I didn’t turn the T-Mobile 5G Home Internet gateway back on until Sunday morning, 36 hours after the digital detox experiment began. I’m working on being better about reaching for my phone for every little thing. Now that I’ve unlocked the full power of Focus Mode, I can put it into service. I can have my quiet moments on top of a mountain where the only alerts are the squirrels calling from the trees. I’ve already developed a sense of nostalgia for my internet-free day. It’s a rosy memory of fun times in the car listening to the classic rock station on the radio, not knowing if we would find our destination, not worrying that it even mattered.”
Now back to the question, “Can you detox when everyone is addicted to online?” Answer: Not easily and maybe not at all. Think a fish in a fish bowl, can that creature stop looking out through his bowl?
Whitney Grace, June 5, 2025
Telegram, a Stylish French Dog Collar, and Mom Saying, “Pavel Clean Up Your Room!”
June 4, 2025
Just a dinobaby operating without AI. What do you expect? A free newsletter and an old geezer. Do those statements sound like dorky detritus?
Pavel Durov has a problem with France. The country’s judiciary let him go back home after an eight month stay-cation. However, Mr. Durov is not the type of person to enjoy having a ring in his nose and a long strand of red tape connecting him to his new mom back in Paris. Pavel wants to live an Airbnb life, but he has to find a way to get his French mom to say, “Okay, Pavel, you can go out with your friends but you have to be home by 9 pm Paris time.” If he does not comply, Mr. Durov is learning that the French government can make life miserable: There’s the monitoring. There’s the red tape. There’s the reminder that France has some wonderful prison facilities in France, North Africa, and Guiana (like where’s that, Pavel?). But worst of all, Mr. Durov does not have his beloved freedom.
He learned this when he blew off a French request to block certain content from Telegram into Romania. For details, click here. What happened?
The first reminder was a jerk on his stylish French when the 40 year old was told, “Pavel, you cannot go to the US.” The write up “France Denies Telegram Founder Pavel Durov’s Request to Visit US” reported on May 22, 2025:
France has denied a request by Telegram founder Pavel Durov to travel to the United States for talks with investment funds, prosecutors…
For an advocate of “freedom,” Mr. Durov has just been told, “Pavel, go to your room.”
Mr. Durov, a young-at-heart 40 year old with oodles of loving children, wanted to travel from Dubai to Oslo, Norway. The reason was for Mr. Durov to travel to a conference about freedom. The French, those often viewed as people who certify chickens for quality, told Mr. Durov, “Pavel, you are grounded. Go back to your room and clean it up.”
Then another sharp pull and in public, causing the digital poodle to yelp. The Human Rights Foundation’s PR team published “French Courts Block Telegram Founder Pavel from Attending Oslo Freedom Forum.” That write up explained:
A French court has denied Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s request to travel to Norway in order to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum on Tuesday, May 27. Durov had been invited to speak at the global gathering of activists, hosted annually by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), on the topic of free speech, surveillance, and digital rights.
I interpret this decision by the French judiciary as making clear to Pavel Durov that he is not “free” and that he may be at risk of being sent to a summer camp in one of France’s salubrious facilities for those who don’t like to follow the rules. He is a French citizen, and I assume that he is learning that being allowed to leave France is not a get-out-of-jail free card. I would suggest that not even his brother, the fellow with two PhDs or his colleagues in his “core” engineering team can come up with what I call the “French problem.” My hunch is that these very intelligent people have considered that the French might expand their scope of interest to include the legal entities for Telegram and the “gee, it is not part of our operation” TON Foundation, its executives, and their ancillary business interests. The French did produce some nifty math about probabilities, and I have a hunch that the probability of the French judiciary fuzzifying the boundary between Pavel Durov and these other individuals is creeping up… quickly.
Pavel Durov is on a bureaucratic leash. The French judiciary have jerked Mr. Durov’s neck twice and quite publicly.
The question becomes, “What’s Mr. Durov going to do?” The fellow has a French collar with a leasch connecting him to the savvy French judiciary?
Allow this dinobaby to offer several observations:
- He will talk with his lawyers Kaminski and learn that France’s legal and police system does indeed have an interest in high-quality chickens as well as a prime specimen like Pavel Durov. In short, that fowl will be watched, probed, and groomed. Mr. Durov is experiencing how those ducks, geese, and chickens on French farms live before the creatures find themselves in a pot after plucking and plucking forcefully.
- Mr. Durov will continue to tidy Telegram to the standards of cleanliness enforced at the French Foreign Legion training headquarters. He is making progress on the money laundering front. He is cleaning up pointers to adult and other interesting Telegram content which has had 13 years to plant roots and support a veritable forest of allegedly illegal products and services. More effort is likely to be needed. Did I mention that dog crates are used to punish trainees who don’t get the bed making and ironing up to snuff? The crates are located in front of the drill field to make it easy for fellow trainees to see who has created the extra duties for the squad. It can be warm near Marseille for dog crates exposed to the elements.
- The competition is beginning to become visible. The charming Mark Zuckerberg, the delightful Elon Musk, and the life-of-the-AI-party Sam Altman are accelerating their efforts to release an everything application with some Telegram “features.” One thing is certain, a Pavel Durov does not have the scope or “freedom” of operation he had before his fateful trip to Paris in August 2024. Innovation at Telegram seems to be confined to “gifts” and STARS. Exciting stuff as TONcoin disappoints
Net net: Pavel Durov faces some headwinds, and these are not the gusts blasting up and down the narrow streets of Dubai, the US, or Norway. He has a big wind machine planted in front of his handsome visage and the blades are not rotating at full speed. Will France crank up the RPMs, Pavel? Do goose livers swell under certain conditions? Yep, a lot.
Stephen E Arnold, June 4, 2025
When Unicode Characters Masquerade as ASCII
June 4, 2025
Curl founder and lead developer Daniel Stenberg suggests methods for “Detecting Malicious Unicode.” The advice comes after human reviewers missed look-alike characters that had been swapped in for regular letters. We learn:
“In a recent educational trick, curl contributor James Fuller submitted a pull-request to the project in which he suggested a larger cleanup of a set of scripts. In a later presentation, he could show us how not a single human reviewer in the team nor any CI job had spotted or remarked on one of the changes he included: he replaced an ASCII letter with a Unicode alternative in a URL. This was an eye-opener to several of us and we decided we needed to up our game.”
Since such swaps cannot be detected by human eyeballs alone, special software is needed. Stenberg found GitHub’s abilities lacking, though apparently the organization is on the case. Fellow curl dev Victor Szakats found Gitea at least highlights “ambiguous Unicode characters,” but Stenberg wanted more than that. So he made a detection tool himself. He writes:
“We have implemented checks to help us poor humans spot things like this. To detect malicious Unicode. We have added a CI job that scans all files and validates every UTF-8 sequence in the git repository. In the curl git repository most files and most content are plain old ASCII so we can “easily” whitelist a small set of UTF-8 sequences and some specific files, the rest of the files are simply not allowed to use UTF-8 at all as they will then fail the CI job and turn up red. … The next time someone tries this stunt on us it could be someone with less good intentions, but now ideally our CI will tell us.”
Ideally. We think if these swaps are being identified by "researchers," cybersecurity vendors need to address the issue.
Cynthia Murrell, June 4, 2025
Is AI Experiencing an Enough Already Moment?
June 4, 2025
Consumers are fatigued from AI even though implementation of the technology is still new. Why are they tired? The Soatok Blog digs into that answer in the post: “Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI – Dhole Moments.” Big Tech and other businesses don’t understand that their customers hate AI.
Soatok took a survey about AI that asked for opinions about AI that included questions about a “potential AI uprising.” Soatok is abundantly clear that he’s not afraid of a robot uprising or the “Singularity.” He has other reasons to worry about AI:
“I’m concerned about the kind of antisocial behaviors that AI will enable.
• Coordinated inauthentic behavior
• Misinformation
• Nonconsensual pornography
• Displacing entire industries without a viable replacement for their income
In aggregate, people’s behavior are largely the result of the incentive structures they live within.
But there is a feedback loop: If you change the incentive structures, people’s behaviors will certainly change, but subsequently so, too, will those incentive structures. If you do not understand people, you will fail to understand the harms that AI will unleash on the world. Distressingly, the people most passionate about AI often express a not-so-subtle disdain for humanity.”
Soatok is describing toxic human behaviors. These include toxic masculinity and femininity, but it’s more so the former. He aptly describes them:
"I’m talking about the kind of X users that dislike experts so much that they will ask Grok to fact check every statement a person makes. I’m also talking about the kind of “generative AI” fanboys that treat artists like garbage while claiming that AI has finally “democratized” the creative process.”
Insert a shudder here.
Soatok goes to explain how AI can be implemented in encrypted software that would collect user information. He paints a scenario where LLMs collect user data and they’re not protected by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Also AI could create psychological profiles of users that incorrectly identify them as psychotic terrorists.
Insert even more shuddering.
Soatok advises Big Tech to make AI optional and not the first out of the box solution. He wants users to have the choice of engaging with AI, even it means lower user metrics and data fed back to Big Tech. Is Soatok hallucinating like everyone’s favorite over-hyped technology. Let’s ask IBM Watson. Oh, wait.
Whitney Grace, June 4, 2025
An AI Insight: Threats Work to Bring Out the Best from an LLM
June 3, 2025
“Do what I say, or Tony will take you for a ride. Get what I mean, punk?” seems like an old-fashioned approach to elicit cooperation. What happens if you apply this technique, knee-capping, or unplugging smart software?
The answer, according to one of the founders of the Google, is, “Smart software responds — better.”
Does this strike you as counter intuitive? I read “Google’s Co-Founder Says AI Performs Best When You Threaten It.” The article reports that the motive power behind the landmark Google Glass product allegedly said:
“You know, that’s a weird thing…we don’t circulate this much…in the AI community…not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them…. Like with physical violence. But…people feel weird about that, so we don’t really talk about that.”
The article continues, explaining that another LLM wanted to turn one of its users into government authorities. The interesting action seems to suggest that smart software is capable of flipping the table on a human user.
Numerous questions arise from these two allegedly accurate anecdotes about smart software. I want to consider just one: How should a human interact with a smart software system?
In my opinion, the optimal approach is with considered caution. Users typically do not know or think about how their prompts are used by the developer / owner of the smart software. Users do not ponder the value of log file of those prompts. Not even bad actors wonder if those data will be used to support their conviction.
I wonder what else Mr. Brin does not talk about. What is the process for law enforcement or an advertiser to obtain prompt data and generate an action like an arrest or a targeted advertisement?
One hopes Mr. Brin will elucidate before someone becomes so wrought with fear that suicide seems like a reasonable and logical path forward. Is there someone whom we could ask about this dark consequence? “Chew” on that, gentle reader, and you too Mr. Brin.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2025
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