This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

Infrastructure “ Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now-visible infrastructure.”
— Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure"

In July 2004 I found myself sitting alone in the dark, on the enclosed deck of a ferry boat oozing between fog-shrouded islands of the Alaskan coast. The scenery was haunting, but after the first three hours, I decided to occupy myself by finally reading Neal Stephenson's essay about the command-line. Halfway through it I began crossing things out, and scribbling comments in the margin. The essay was five years old, and in dire need of a fresh perspective.

Months later, I learned that Stephenson himself was dissatisfied with the essay. He wrote that it, "is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision." An "Ask Slashdot" poll quoted him as saying, "I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."

Though I have fleshed out my original comments into longer, more structured pieces, it is not my intention to replace or revise Neal Stephenson's original writing. His original essay is a much more cohesive and entertaining read than my notes are. (He is a Writer, after all. I consider myself a code-monkey by comparison.) In fact, my notes do not hold together unless they use the original essay as a framework, and that's why his entire essay is reproduced here, with my comments color-coded. And yes, I have sought and obtained permission from Neal to do this.

rganizing is not a process of ideological matchmaking. Most people’s politics will not mirror our own, and even people who identify with us strongly on some points will often differ sharply on others. When organizers do not fully understand each other’s beliefs or identities, people will often stumble and offend one another, even if they earnestly wish to build from a place of solidarity. Efforts to build diverse, intergenerational movements will always generate conflict and discomfort. But the desire to shrink groups down to spaces of easy agreement is not conducive to movement building.

This article by Barath Raghavan and the legendary Bruce Schneier explodes the myth that the only way that Big Tech products can operate is by hoarding everyone's personal data

They lay out a technical roadmap using "decoupling", such as Tim Berners-Lee's Solid or Raghavan's own INVISV Relay

“Money in the Bank,” a new story by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling

Maybe you know how to solder a bit, but you suck at it. Or it's frustrating and never comes out nice and you hate it.

Here's how to make it enjoyable, and get good results as a side effect.

We decided to use Terraform to configure our services. It lets you describe states of the infrastructure you want in plain text and takes care of calling the providers' API to provision some cloud resources. Resources and data are defined through .tf files and the generated state is stored by Terraform in a .tfstate file (local or in the cloud as we will see later on). It also permits to have an overview of what changes we are going to make using the plan subcommand.

We had the chance to see quite a bit of clusters in our years of experience with kubernetes (both managed and unmanaged - on GCP, AWS and Azure), and we see some mistakes being repeated. No shame in that, we’ve done most of these too!

I’ll try to show the ones we see very often and talk a bit about how to fix them.

A brief look at models for integrating Kubernetes clusters into existing networks.

Consul is a service mesh solution providing a full featured control plane with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality. Each of these features can be used individually as needed, or they can be used together to build a full service mesh. Consul requires a data plane and supports both a proxy and native integration model. Consul ships with a simple built-in proxy so that everything works out of the box, but also supports 3rd party proxy integrations such as Envoy.

Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Enter this weekend's reading topic: Privacy.

“Alternate history, in my opinion, is a more demanding game,” says the author of “Agency” and other science fiction novels, “if only because conventional historical fiction, like history, is itself highly speculative.”

The need for IPv6 is greater than ever due to unprecedented Internet growth and the rapid, continual development of smart phones, tablet computers and other online-enabled devices. In February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization responsible for international IP address allocation, confirmed complete IPv4 resources depletion. Other global organizations have also reported critical limits on IPv4 address availability. In April 2011, the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Registry became the first of the IANA’s five regional registries to reach its IPv4 address limit. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is expected to follow suit in the near future.

I recently asked our writer community to share with us what they're reading. These folks come from all different walks of life and roles in tech. What they have in common is that they are living and breathing Linux and open source every day.

Drink in this fantastic list. Many of them are free and available to download.

You may see books you've been meaning to get around to, books that are completely new to you, and some that feel like old friends.

It’s early yet, but we’ll see once the bodies are buried

In the introductory article of this series I wrote that one of disadvantages of Podman and Buildah is that the technology is still pretty new and moves fast. This final article you are reading appeared with much delay because from Podman 1.3.1 to 1.4.1, one of the key features that we will look at in this article was broken.

Luckily, Podman 1.4.1 and above not only fixes features that were broken for a few weeks, but also has these features finally covered with tests. Hopefully, there will be no such dramatic loss in functionality in future releases. My original warning still applies though: new container technology toolchain is new and sometimes unstable. Keep that in mind.

Vielleicht hat selten jemand Foucault so konsequent und düster zu Ende gedacht wie Mark Fisher, vielleicht hat es auch kaum jemand wirklich ausgehalten, ihn so zu Ende zu denken, wie man sagt, zu Ende denken, wenn es das überhaupt gibt, etwas zu Ende zu denken, jemanden zu Ende zu denken, überhaupt etwas irgendwann zu Ende zu denken – vielleicht sollte man auch einfach viele Gedanken lieber erst gar nicht zu Ende zu denken, damit man sich selbst nicht aus Versehen dabei auch noch zu Ende denkt, vielleicht ist das aber auch schon eine Spur der Macht, dass wir bestimmte Gedanken nicht zu Ende denken, weil wir wissen, was auf uns warten würde, würden wir einen bestimmten Gedanken bis an sein Ende durchspielen.

The idea of “smart cities” – the application of digital technologies to the urban environment – is much in vogue. But as this blog has noted, although potentially powerful, the approach does raise serious issues for privacy. Perhaps the most ambitious “smart city” project so far is one involving a sister company of Google, Sidewalk Labs. After looking at over 50 possible partners it choose to work with the Canadian city of Toronto. Sidewalk Toronto was announced in October last year, and involves the redevelopment of a publicly-owned space of more than 800 acres, one of North America’s largest areas of underdeveloped urban land.