Hard Pass

DoorDash launched a standalone Tasks app on March 19, paying its delivery couriers to complete short activities designed to train AI and robotic systems. Couriers can earn money by filming themselves washing dishes, photographing restaurant menus, or recording speech in foreign languages. Pay is disclosed upfront and calibrated to the effort and complexity of each assignment.

In the end, those couriers will be replaced by AI trained machines.

A very quiet queue has formed in Europe where some of Canada's long-standing, closest allies are seeking shelter under France's small but robust nuclear umbrella.

The initiative of French President Emmanuel Macron, who declared the next 50 years to be the "era of nuclear weapons," is — on paper — intended to add another layer of deterrence to NATO's American-backed security guarantees.

Once again — on paper — Russia is the adversary that needs deterring.

But with U.S. President Donald Trump once again trash-talking NATO allies over their reluctance to join his war in the Middle East and the sensational — but hardly surprising — Financial Times report that Denmark was preparing to put up a fight to defend Greenland against American annexation, a whole new dimension emerges to the French advanced nuclear deterrence strategy.

• In an internal all-hands, Google DeepMind leaders addressed staff concerns about Pentagon work.
• Leaders said there was a "robust process" to ensure the contracts align with Google's AI principles.
• At the same time, leaders said Google was pursuing more contracts in areas like cybersecurity and biosecurity.

Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator, will address a Heartland Institute forum in April. The organization says speakers will challenge the climate crisis “narrative.”

The Heartland Institute was created to meet the shared need of the fossil fuels and tobacco industries to avoid the inconvenient science pointing to the harms of their products.

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https://bloor.tw/@bloor/116256896607396957

Don’t let the bill’s title fool you from the contents of the text.

https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/45-1/s-209

But not if you write it backwards!

(Credit to Dgar on Mastodon)

The publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to “wrongly put words into people’s mouths”.

That is an interesting portfolio.

Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he “fell into the trap of hallucinations” – the term for AI-generated errors – when using the technology.

Vandermeersch, a fellow of “journalism and society” at the European publishing group, has been suspended from his role.

The experienced journalist said he had summarised reports using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s NotebookLM, and not checked whether the quotes from those summaries were accurate. He subsequently published them in his Substack newsletter.

The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them.

Again, this is a cockroach situation; there are many more cases of such things across industries that never get caught and don't make the news.

Former NFL reporter Michele Tafoya acknowledged how “frustrating” and “hard” rising gas prices are for consumers during a Wednesday radio interview, but she suggested Americans should minimize some of their spending to support President Trump’s actions in the Middle East.

“I think right now at least just kind of keeping a stiff upper lip. Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks and so that gas goes a little further,” she told Tennessee’s KWAM radio host Todd Starnes.

Walmart is developing algorithmic tools to shape how it sets prices, even as US lawmakers intensify scrutiny of data-driven pricing in grocery and retail. The retailer has secured two US patents this year covering automated markdowns and machine learning-based demand forecasting, adding to a broader portfolio of nearly 50 US patents granted to the company so far in 2026.