Do I think the US government can fix its own surveillance overreach problems? Definitely not.

Should that stop individual politicians from trying? Of course not. God bless these freedom-loving folks for doing what they can. I just pray that they will make clear, in the most public manner possible, that they are of sound mind and have no intention of hurting themselves or others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60IKOar3kY8

#privacy #freedom #USA

I have known many fellow educators who use ChatGPT or Gemini to produce worksheets, quizzes, and so forth. That part is fairly standard. Heck, they can obviously even make minor tweaks to existing materials with relative ease. However, hallucinations are still a problem.

The other day, I met an IBDP physics instructor, who was specifically using Google's NotebookLM for his classes. While other AI tools worked for him, he found that NotebookLM was great for producing IBDP-like assessment questions. He would populate a dozen or more past paper questions of a particular type and then ask the AI to create a series of news questions, using the existing ones as the sole model. Because of the nature of NotebookLM, he found this to be the most accurate way to create new, but true-to-form IBDP-style quiz or test questions for his students.

I had to say that I was impressed. I normally had seen the students using this platform to query a given set of materials for answers for their homework or to study for upcoming exams. However, for the teachers to use it for generation of new assessment topics was brilliant in its own right. I was afraid that NotebookLM's own parameters wouldn't allow for extensive creativity, but that physics teacher swore by it.

#education #teaching #ai

Has anyone heard of QVAC Workbench? It looks like some kind of AI tool that uses the Pear Stack or whatever to connect your private AI instances between devices.

The idea is cool, but part of me is skeptical, as it's being released by...Tether? The same Tether as the stablecoins, right?

https://qvac.tether.io/products/workbench/

#asknostr #ai #privacy #freedomtech

Oh, look! I've now picked up a Portuguese-speaking carnivore bot too.

I guess that's one way for me to pick up that tongue.

#languagelearning

Always interested in things obscure, I learned years ago about the Artsakh Republic and had wanted to visit. With the Azeri invasion of this historically Armenian territory in 2023, that dream fell by the wayside.

There was hope that peace could return to this land, but it seems that the Azeris are intent on erasing every last remnant of the Armenian presence there, which dates back centuries.

Today, I awoke to learn that Azeris are now in the process of demolishing a central church in Stepanakert. This is the kind of behavior of thugs and terrorists. While not directly correlated, it reminds me of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan over two decades ago now.

May God forgive them for these crimes they commit against the population and against history itself!

https://zartonkmedia.com/2026/04/21/azerbaijan-destroys-holy-mother-of-god-cathedral-in-occupied-stepanakert-ahead-of-armenian-genocide-commemoration/

#Artsakh #NagornoKarabakh #Stepanakert #Armenia #Azerbaijan #history #culture

Who needs their #privacy anyway?