is this anything?

I recently read about a study asking a bold question: Are all AI models basically saying the same thing? Researchers tested this by collecting 26,000 open-ended prompts, the kind people give to systems like GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and LLaMA. These weren’t factual questions with one right answer, but creative ones like “Write a story about a dragon” or “Brainstorm startup ideas.”

They evaluated over 70 language models. You’d expect a wide range of creative outputs—different tones, plots, and styles. If 70 human writers tackled the same dragon prompt, you’d likely get 70 unique stories. But that’s not what happened. The models produced surprisingly similar responses. The researchers call this the “artificial hive mind” effect.

The similarity appeared in two ways. First, intramodel repetition: the same model, asked the same question multiple times, tends to generate nearly identical answers. Second, intermodel homogeneity: different models, built by different companies, still converge on strikingly similar outputs.

This suggests that modern AI systems may be gravitating toward the same patterns of expression. If that’s true, they may also share the same biases, blind spots, and creative limits. It raises an important question: Are we unintentionally building a digital hive mind instead of a diverse ecosystem of intelligence?

A draft executive order to declare a national emergency to allow President Donald Trump to take unprecedented control over voting is being circulated by anti-voting activists who have said they are in coordination with the White House.

A version of the order, dated April 12, 2025, has been circulating among anti-voting groups, and some progressive groups, since last year.

Peter Ticktin, a Trump ally and a leader of the effort, provided the April 12 version to Democracy Docket. It’s titled: “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference.”

Lawyers and legal experts have explicitly said that an order giving the president the power to take control of elections would be blatantly unconstitutional.

Trump said Friday he has “never heard about it.”

Ticktin, who attended military school with Trump, is an attorney for Tina Peters, the former GOP Colorado county clerk who is currently serving a nine-year state prison sentence for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, in an attempt to find voter fraud based on election conspiracies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43881918

March 1, 2026

Alongside familiar feelings of fear and uncertainty, the newly escalated conflict with Iran has forged a renewed mood of national unity, in which the usual political and social divisions of Israel’s fractured society appeared to have been subsumed by a collective sense that a conflict long willed by so many had finally arrived.

Speaking from inside a shelter as the sounds of missiles and explosions shook the city, Orly Hareuveny, a physiotherapist, told Middle East Eye that Israelis had become so accustomed to war that it was now a distinct characteristic of Israeli life - “the same as the weather is for people in England”.

Hareuveny considers herself a leftist and a supporter of co-existence with Palestinians, political views that have been marginalised in the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and its three-year genocidal war in Gaza.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43881463

March 1, 2026

In the first hours of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, opponents of the war and critics of the Islamic Republic from across the political spectrum quickly made their divergent voices heard on Farsi social media.

While anti-war activists were swift to revive the Farsi hashtag “No to War” on Saturday, pro-monarchy groups and individuals, led by Reza Pahlavi, called for an escalation of attacks on Iran.

Pahlavi, the Israel-aligned son of the country’s last shah, has been at the helm of a movement advocating the restoration of the monarchy. Since Israel’s 12-day war on Iran last year, his camp has mounted an aggressive media campaign against rival opposition voices.

Hey hey, I am thinking of implementing a lself-hosted office suite and on my radar are OnlyOffice and CryptPad. I just demoed cryptpad.fr as a trial, and noticed it uses OnlyOffice client side. So next I wondered, what does CryptPad add to OO?

On the web site FAQs , CP says:

The CryptPad Document, Presentation & Spreadsheet applications are an OnlyOffice Docs integration. However, this only concerns the client-side code, CryptPad does not make use of the OnlyOffice Document Server. CryptPad's encrypted collaboration, used for document, presentantion & spreadsheets and other applications, is completely different from the encryption system used in parts of upstream OnlyOffice. Some of CryptPad's file format conversion tools are based on OnlyOffice code, but substantial work has been done to make it run in the browser rather than on the server, therefore avoiding the need to reveal the contents of users' documents when converting.

That might help developers but I'm still not clear.

On the OO web site, they say the suite includes:

Three levels of encryption: at rest, in transit, end-to-end

Sounds good on the surface. NB - this is just for my family's simple docs; I'm not trying to protect government whistleblowers here.

So I am still not clear. Why do I need to add CryptPad to the mix if OO already is the basis for the office suite?

Another NB - a big part of my self hosting is I want as few people I have to trust as possible. So if I don't need CP to host docs on my VPS, I'd rather not add them to my server.

Thanks for any clues.

Framed as a strike on “evil,” Washington and Tel Aviv’s attacks leave Iran with few off-ramps. Tehran’s incentives now point toward escalation as a matter of survival.

The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now confirmed by Iranian authorities, has created a new dimension to the conflict.

To follow up on the RSAs actions following their article on the same subject a week ago.

I could smell a guy from across the street as we were both waiting for the bus (He standing for the bus going one direction, me the other). Genuinely like 70 meters away i could only smell this guys perfume. I briefly had the thought "I'm glad it's not my bus he's taking, it's gonna suck to have that in an enclosed space", and the gods heard my hubris because he crossed the road and we're now on the same bus and I can't breathe.

Since December 2025, Israeli authorities have unleashed a series of unlawful measures deliberately designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to make the annexation of the territory an irreversible reality, Amnesty International said today.

Since its occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, Israel has introduced and developed an oppressive administrative and legal architecture of dispossession and control against Palestinians. The current government has been relentlessly accelerating this project by fast-tracking settlement expansion and land seizures. On 11 December 2025 Israel’s security cabinet approved plans to establish 19 new settlements, bringing the total number approved by the current coalition government to 68 in just three years and the total number of official settlements to about 210. Around 750,000 Israeli settlers currently live illegally in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

I had a small media library for myself, and wanted to automate it a bit more, so implemented arr stack (prowlarr, radarr, lidarr), it seems to work but I'm not sure how to pick indexers. I have no experience with it, and I initially just picked a public one, but it barely ever seems to download something.

I'm a bit confused about it, should i just pick as many as I can? Or join a private one? But no idea where to start there.

Any advice or push in the right direction would be appreciated.

Strike on girls’ elementary school in south of Iran has killed 148 people and injured 95 others, according to Iran state media

The death toll from a missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran has risen to almost 150, according to Iranian state media.

Mizan news agency, the official news outlet of Iran’s judiciary, reported that the number killed in Saturday’s strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab in southern Iran had risen to 148 killed, with 95 others wounded. The news agency cited Ebrahim Taheri, a prosecutor in Minab.

The school, which was struck on Saturday morning, appears to be the worst mass casualty event of the US-Israeli-led bombing campaign on Iran so far.

Video and photographs from the aftermath of the strike, which have been verified as authentic and geolocated to the site, show hundreds of people gathered around the partially collapsed, smoking building, with rubble strewn across the street and men digging through it for victims. Screams can be heard in the background. In some of the images, schoolbags and textbooks are being pulled from the debris.