Erika Souklaye
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erikasouklaye.bsky.social
Erika Souklaye
@erikasouklaye.bsky.social
Strategic communications and social innovation UNDP, former UNHCR. Soon over to @uncdf.bsky.social. One foot near an olive tree the other in Brooklyn. #SDGs #finance4dev
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
In Ghana, UNCDF is showing how local finance drives national resilience.

Through catalytic investments and training, 13 districts now manage climate funds that have reached over one million people.

🌱 Mary’s story shows it’s working. #COP30

uncdf.live/cop-ghana
Putting people first: Investing in locally led climate-smart solutions in Ghana
Mary Ocansey is a climate-smart smallholder farmer based just outside the Ghanaian capital of Accra, in Ada East District. She used to strug...
uncdf.live
November 11, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Buy their full content on a usb stick. Best gift ever. Available on the Wikimedia Foundation website.
Better download Wikipedia now
October 2, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
🚨 Police in Bedfordshire are working with tech giant Palantir to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate people's personal information...

...including health records, sex lives, and political opinions

Read the full story libertyinvestigates.org.uk/articles/uk-...
July 9, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
Meet us tomorrow in Seville! 🇪🇸

#DYK 👉🏾 UNCDF is the only #UN entity with a capital mandate? We provide catalytic financing through grants, concessional loans & guarantees to public & private sector

Learn about us ahead of #FFD4 & see where we'll be speaking: uncdf.org/uncdf-at-ffd4

@undp.org
June 29, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Chalk on pavement beats fancy YouTube ads today.
#nyc #mamdani
June 25, 2025 at 3:56 AM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
Good news/bad news from the upcoming 2030 reform of the UN's Standard for National Accounting.

Good news: extraction of non-renewable resources such as oil, gas and minerals are to be counted as a negative component of GDP. GDP of petrostates goes down.

Bad news: crypto assets, crypto mining […]
Original post on mastodon.green
mastodon.green
June 9, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
Been saying this for awhile, but will repeat it for emphasis: If you love freedom but don’t care if it applies to everyone, what you actually love is privilege.
May 30, 2025 at 7:38 PM
"The current global financial system is simply not working for Africa"

Read below our (modest yet ambitious) contribution to fixing it. 👇
🌍Africa holds immense potential, but perceptions of risk still block capital from reaching where it's needed most.

Ahead of #FfD4, UNCDF's Transactional Risk Specialist, Charulata Singal, explores how we can shift this with #blendedfinance ➡️ uncdf.link/8904
May 28, 2025 at 2:19 AM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
I have waited my whole life, for this moment....
April 28, 2025 at 7:05 PM
Immensely proud to see the very clear role @uncdf.bsky.social plays to unlock opportunities and make capital flow in places largely considered unbankable.

Have a read and reach out!
#developmentfinance #blendedfinance #missingmiddle
What happens when markets are too fragile, and risk too high— even for concessional capital?

🔗 bit.ly/4ih3OrU 👉 a powerful reflection by our Executive Secretary, inspired by a @financialtimes.com op-ed by World Bank President Ajay Banga.
April 11, 2025 at 4:46 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
What happens when markets are too fragile, and risk too high— even for concessional capital?

🔗 bit.ly/4ih3OrU 👉 a powerful reflection by our Executive Secretary, inspired by a @financialtimes.com op-ed by World Bank President Ajay Banga.
April 11, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
Wikipedia's rising bandwidth due to AI scraping. It's sending their infrastructure costs through the roof and threatening the free availability of information.

www.linkedin.com/posts/maciej...
April 10, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
"Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating datacentres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and are building many more, an investigation by SourceMaterial and the Guardian has found." www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are building datacentres in water-scarce parts of five continents
www.theguardian.com
April 9, 2025 at 4:11 PM
And so it is starting.
March 14, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
“One by one, human rights are being suffocated... by autocrats, warmongers & voices of division & anger who view human rights not as a boon to humanity, but as a barrier to the power, profit & control they seek.”
- António Guterres UN Secretary General
news.un.org/en/story/202...
World’s ‘warmongers’ must end disdain for global order, UN chief insists
With no end to numerous protracted conflicts - not least in Ukraine, three years to the day since the full-scale Russian invasion - UN chief António Guterres on Monday scorned the world’s “warmongers”...
news.un.org
February 24, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄
February 23, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
If anyone is documenting the pages going missing, I have a small database. I will not be taking it on long-term but am using it right now and am willing to hand it off to a relevant group. Pages as simple as Women in the Federal Workforce have gone missing.
January 27, 2025 at 7:13 AM
“a random word blender being used as a source of information.”
BBC tested a bunch of chatbots used as news source:

- 51% have issues with answers
- 19% fabricate fake statistics / info
- 13% fabricate fake quotes or alter them

This is exactly what you expect from a random word blender being used as a source of information.

www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/...
February 11, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
i think kendrick is president now?
February 10, 2025 at 1:38 AM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
Top comment on the recent NYT story on DOGE’s young aides

www.nytimes.com/shared/comme...
February 9, 2025 at 2:09 AM
(Quite literally.)
(What a time to be alive) "Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries" https://gizmodo.com/add-fcking-to-your-google-searches-to-neutralize-ai-summaries-2000557710

#ai #enshittification
Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries
<p>If you are tired of Google’s AI-powered search results leading you astray with poor information from bad sources, there is some good news. It turns out that if you include any expletives in your search query, Google will not return an AI Overview, as they are called, at the top of the results page.</p> <p>For instance, if you search “How large is the student body of Yale University?” the search results page will return a large AI-generated blurb above the blue links. If you instead search, “How large is the fucking student body at Yale University?” you will instead get a standard list of blue link results, sans-AI summary.</p> <p>This is not the first time internet sleuths have discovered a way to disable Google’s AI-powered results. Other methods are more complicated, however, like adding a specific string of characters to the search results page URL. This method of swearing and pleading at Google to “just give me the fucking links” is much more cathartic.</p> <div class="od-wrapper od-wrapper-both od-background"> <div class="Mobile_Pos1 od-mobile" id="optidigital-adslot-Mobile_Pos1" style="display:none"></div><div class="Content_1 od-desktop" id="optidigital-adslot-Content_1" style="display:none"></div> </div> <p>We are going to go out on a limb here and say that if people are regularly finding techniques to disable AI summaries in Google searches, perhaps that means they do not want them in the first place? Google search results have never been perfect, of course—there is still a lot of poor information across the web. But AI summaries present users with a prominent blurb at the top of their search that looks authoritative when it just risks compounding the misinformation problem with more erroneous slop.</p> <p>It is the same way Siri has been made worse by its integration with ChatGPT. At least in the past, when the voice assistant did not know how to answer a question it would just throw users to the web. Now Siri offers up ChatGPT-generated responses instead, sometimes <a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2025/01/24/siri-eagles-33-false-super-bowl-wins-basic-test/">spitting out incorrect nonsense</a> instead of admitting it is not sure. But this is all being forced on users whether they like it or not. From Google Docs to X and Instagram, there are AI buttons and search boxes and dropdowns everywhere now, because every tech company needs to have an AI strategy. Is a basic keyword search too much to ask?</p> <div class="od-wrapper od-wrapper-both od-background"> <div class="Mobile_Pos2 od-mobile" id="optidigital-adslot-Mobile_Pos2" style="display:none"></div><div class="Content_2 od-desktop" id="optidigital-adslot-Content_2" style="display:none"></div> </div> <figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2000557753" class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_2000557753"><img alt="Screenshot 2025 01 31 At 2.52.11 pm" class="size-full wp-image-2000557753" decoding="async" height="1452" sizes="(max-width: 1023px) calc(100vw - 2rem), (max-width: 1279px) calc(100vw - 26rem), 680px" src="https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM.jpg" srcset="https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM.jpg 1810w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-300x241.jpg 300w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-1024x821.jpg 1024w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-768x616.jpg 768w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-680x546.jpg 680w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-896x719.jpg 896w, https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-31-at-2.52.11 PM-1792x1438.jpg 1792w" width="1810"/><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-2000557753">No AI summaries here!</figcaption></figure> <p>When Google first introduced AI Overviews into search, it went viral for <a href="https://gizmodo.com/worst-google-ai-answers-glue-pizza-dogs-playing-sports-1851495298">returning nonsensical responses</a>, such as suggesting that one can prevent cheese from sliding off their pizzas by using glue or improve gut health by eating pebbles. It is believed Google’s model sourced the information from Reddit comments. AI does not know how to identify sarcasm or satire.</p> <p><em>Ars Technica</em> earlier <a href="https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing-links-cursing-disables-googles-ai-overviews/?comments-page=1">reported</a> on the new loophole, which, if we are speculating, is caused by Google’s overly cautious steering of its AI model. Whereas a bot like xAI’s Grok is more than happy to swear and discuss sensitive topics, Google’s Gemini keeps it PG. Google has likely trained Gemini to avoid repeating expletives, so it simply is disabled in search when a curse word is present in order to avoid that.</p> <div class="od-wrapper od-wrapper-both od-background"> <div class="Mobile_Pos3 od-mobile" id="optidigital-adslot-Mobile_Pos3" style="display:none"></div><div class="Content_3 od-desktop" id="optidigital-adslot-Content_3" style="display:none"></div> </div> <p>Google has argued that AI Overviews, as they are called, do not reduce traffic sent to websites because users will view summaries and be interested in delving deeper into the source material after finding something of interest. That logic has not comforted media companies, which have been litigating the likes of OpenAI and Perplexity for ingesting their content into large language models.</p> <p>We imagine Google will close the expletive loophole eventually, but in the meantime, if you are sick of AI, you now know an easy way to avoid it. Just tell Google to give you the fucking links.</p>
gizmodo.com
February 3, 2025 at 3:23 PM
Last month I started becoming a regular monthly donor to #wikipedia If you can, consider join me, every penny counts! And if you ever look for a gift, make it count, check their merch and defend #informationintegrity and #democracy in the meantime.

👉 donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?...
Make your donation now - Wikimedia Foundation
Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other crucial free knowledge projects. Each year, the generosity of the 2% of readers who donate allows us to expand the reac...
donate.wikimedia.org
January 29, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
What tips would you give to someone wanting to get into open source?

Here are ours👇
github.blog/open-source/...
New to open source? Here’s everything you need to get started
Explore our simple guide to finding projects, understanding guidelines, and making an impact.
github.blog
January 28, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Deleted my X account. I opened my Twitter account 16 years ago. I should feel nostalgic, I just feel relieved. Just closed #Facebook too. Instagram is more psychological. But #WhatsApp… how do you all feel? Most professional conversations happening there seem so hard to move elsewhere. Any tip?
a woman says " maybe it 's time " on a nbc poster
ALT: a woman says " maybe it 's time " on a nbc poster
media.tenor.com
January 22, 2025 at 3:37 AM
Reposted by Erika Souklaye
@who.int plays a crucial role in protecting the health & security of the world’s people, including Americans, by addressing the root causes of disease, building stronger health systems, detecting, preventing & responding to health emergencies, including disease outbreaks.
www.who.int/news/item/21...
WHO comments on United States’ announcement of intent to withdraw
The World Health Organization regrets the announcement that the United States of America intends to withdraw from the organization.
www.who.int
January 21, 2025 at 4:22 PM