Flutterby™! (short)

Brookings: Math-intensive fields have a gender problem: The men are worse at math.

Via.

Study compares heart risks of COVID-19 infection and vaccination, and the results may surprise you.

The results will not surprise you. Risk of rare heart complications in children higher after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination

Co-author Professor Angela Wood, University of Cambridge and Associate Director at the BHF Data Science Centre, said: “Using electronic health records from all children and young people in England, we were able to study very rare but serious heart and clotting complications, and found higher and longer-lasting risks after COVID-19 infection than after vaccination.

The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health: Vascular and inflammatory diseases after COVID-19 infection and vaccination in children and young people in England: a retrospective, population-based cohort study using linked electronic health records

The thing about reading Brian Phillips in The Ringer: The Olivia Nuzzi and RFK Jr. Affair Is Messier Than We Ever Could Have Imagined is that it's a reminder that...

You know how people like to say that the police serve the desires of capital? Olivia Nuzzi's career is a strong reminder that the press serves the desires of capital.

As if the entirety of the New York Times wasn't already that reminder.

Brian Phillips ‪@brianphillips.bsky.social‬ notes that:

People are calling my lede here "appalling," "nightmare fuel," "actively evil," and "a desecration of the human spirit"

and I got to that via ‪that genehack guy from that dead bird site‬ ‪@extremely.website‬ noting:

…and they’re not wrong!

The Register: HashJack attack shows AI browsers can be fooled with a simple ‘#’

Cato describes HashJack as "the first known indirect prompt injection that can weaponize any legitimate website to manipulate AI browser assistants." It outlines a method where actors sneak malicious instructions into the fragment part of legitimate URLs, which are then processed by AI browser assistants such as Copilot in Edge, Gemini in Chrome, and Comet from Perplexity AI. Because URL fragments never leave the AI browser, traditional network and server defenses cannot see them, turning legitimate websites into attack vectors.

Via.

I hate that Apple has decided that Terminal is just gonna suck and you've gotta use iTerm2 if you want to access the command line.

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought Evelina Fedorenko, Steven T. Piantadosi & Edward A. F. Gibson. (PDF), from Nature

Why Nature will not allow the use of generative AI in images and video. Interestingly, though:

For now, Nature is allowing the inclusion of text that has been produced with the assistance of generative AI, providing this is done with appropriate caveats (see go.nature.com/3cbrjbb). The use of such large language model (LLM) tools needs to be documented in a paper’s methods or acknowledgements section, and we expect authors to provide sources for all data, including those generated with the assistance of AI. Furthermore, no LLM tool will be accepted as an author on a research paper.

Which seems to be at odds with a lot of their reasoning over AI images.

Say you want to buy music from someone signed to one of the big labels: is there a place other than Amazon to buy a DRM-free download that doesn't require installing an app?

As Neal Stephenson foretold in The Diamond Age: AI-Powered Toys Caught Telling 5-Year-Olds How to Find Knives and Start Fires With Matches

PromptArmor: Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data

An indirect prompt injection in an implementation blog can manipulate Antigravity to invoke a malicious browser subagent in order to steal credentials and sensitive code from a user’s IDE.

mhoye @mhoye@mastodon.social

the site is called medium because nothing on it is ever rare or well done send toot