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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig
@nic221.bsky.social
4.9K followers 400 following 3.7K posts
E-learning dev & AI educator at U of Arizona Libraries. Former head of UX at MIT Libraries. Winner of MIT Excellence Award. nicolehennig.com. Digital nomad from 2013-17, locationflexiblelife.com.
- vegetarian
- car-free
- universal basic income: yes
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nic221.bsky.social
Nicole Hennig @nic221.bsky.social · Nov 13
Generative AI News https://nicolehennig.com/gen-ai-news/ (my free monthly newsletter) #AI #Substack #newsletters
10 Tips for Keeping Up with Generative AI
nic221.bsky.social
Amazon’s ‘House of David’ Used Over 350 AI Shots in Season 2. Its Creator Isn’t Sorry www.wired.com/story/amazons-… #AI #video #tools
Text Shot: But even if Erwin can’t convince all of his industry peers, his audience hasn’t been turned off by the AI. The shots that use AI flash by quickly, while most casual viewers at home are occupied with a second screen. The use of AI has already started to fade into the background. “I think part of what people seem to react to is pushing ‘We did this with AI’ as a marketing piece to get people excited or frustrated at something,” says Derek Slater, a tech policy strategist and founder of Proteus Strategies. “This will be blended into the production process as another sort of editing and VFX tool and not treated as this bespoke, separate process.”
November 10, 2025 at 2:45 PM
nic221.bsky.social
The State of AI: is China about to win the race? www.ft.com/content/794caa… #AI #China
The State of AI: is China about to win the race?
The world is focused on America’s lead but Beijing has the means, motive and opportunity to pull ahead
www.ft.com
November 9, 2025 at 11:49 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Google Maps navigation gets a powerful boost with Gemini blog.google/products/maps/… #AI #GoogleMaps
Google Maps navigation gets a powerful boost with Gemini
Getting around is easier than ever thanks to Gemini capabilities and our trusted real-world information.
blog.google
November 9, 2025 at 11:43 PM
nic221.bsky.social
HeyGen LiveAvatar www.liveavatar.com #AI #avatars #DigitalTwins
LiveAvatar
Create interactive AI live avatars that talk, reason, and guide users across your product.
www.liveavatar.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:37 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Google's AI Mode gets new agentic capabilities to help book event tickets and beauty appointments | TechCrunch techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/goo… #AI #Google #AIMode #agents
Text Shot: Google announced on Tuesday that it’s launching new agentic capabilities in AI Mode, its feature that allows users to ask complex questions and follow-ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Search. Users can now get help with booking event tickets and beauty and wellness appointments in AI Mode. For example, you can say, “Find me two cheap tickets for the Shaboozey concert coming up. Prefer standing floor tickets.” AI Mode will then search across multiple websites to find real-time ticket options that meet your specific requests. It will then present you with a curated list of ticket prices to choose from. AI Mode links you directly to the booking page so you can finalize your purchase.
November 9, 2025 at 4:33 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Amazon introduces Kindle Translate, an AI-powered translation service for authors to reach global readers www.aboutamazon.com/news/books-and… #AI #translation #Kindle
Text Shot: The new service can translate between English and Spanish, and from German to English. The service is available in beta to select Kindle Direct Publishing authors. Readers will see clear labels for Kindle Translate titles.
November 9, 2025 at 4:31 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Testing Catalog. What's new? Issue #219 🗞️ www.testingcatalog.com/email/99b3267a… #AI #news #KimiK2Thinking (& lots of other updates)
Text Shot: Most notably, Kimi K2 Thinking is now available. It’s impressive that they managed to train such a high-performance model at a low cost, putting pressure on OpenAI, Google, and others to step up their own releases to maintain their performance advantage. Not only is Kimi K2 Thinking cheaper, but Moonshot, the company behind it, has a strong consumer focus with feature-rich apps, unlike DeepSeek. Their platform already includes agent capabilities with computer use, and more advanced agentic features are promised soon. This approach is quite different from last year’s DeepSeek, and Kimi has real potential to challenge OpenAI’s dominance in the market.
November 9, 2025 at 4:29 PM
nic221.bsky.social
SearchResearch (11/5/25): Pro tips on using AI for deep research searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2025/11/search… #AI #DeepResearch
Text Shot: When using AI for deep research, keep in mind 3 heuristics:  1. Be clear about what you want.  Not just in content, but in form and quality.  Be explicit--give examples--ask for everything you want.  2. Review the results for quality. Do this step immediately, and change the prompt if need be to get what you really seek.  Iterate!   3. Ask for contrary points of view.  Don't give in to confirmation bias--proactively ask about other perspectives on the questions you're researching.  4. Double check everything.  No surprise here, but be sure to leave enough time to do this.  Don't just copy/paste what you've found.
November 8, 2025 at 2:14 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Common Crawl - Setting the Record Straight: Common Crawl’s Commitment to Transparency, Fair Use, and the Public Good commoncrawl.org/blog/setting-t… #AI #CommonCrawl #data #WebArchiving (wow, that Atlantic piece was bad, needing this rebuttal)
Text Shot: A recent article in The Atlantic (“The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work,” November 4, 2025) makes several false and misleading claims about the Common Crawl Foundation, including the accusation that our organization has “lied to publishers” about our activities. This allegation is untrue. It misrepresents both how Common Crawl operates and the values that guide our work.
November 7, 2025 at 11:27 PM
nic221.bsky.social
How “Star Trek” Helped Make Midcentury-Modern the Signature Sci-Fi Aesthetic www.dwell.com/article/how-st… (just for fun) #design #scifi
Text Shot: Though TNG pulled in some postmodern elements from the series’s era and the early aughts’ Enterprise series went for a more austere vibe, given that it was set more than 100 years before the original in the mid-22nd century, the (now) retro-futuristic aesthetic Star Trek helped cultivate through its use of midcentury-modern designs still pops up in 21st-century sci-fi depictions, from Blade Runner: 2049 to episodes of Black Mirror. But while some sci-fi has veered toward postapocalyptic hellscapes and steely and/or dusty outposts built in the wake of economic, social, and climate-based collapse, the Star Trek universe has always been based on idealism, and maybe even a bit of luxury.  As Farley explained to Metropolis earlier this year, Star Trek shows a world where somehow, we’ve managed to pull it together and get everything right, moving beyond racism and sexism as a society, ending scarcity, and creating an interplanetary democracy that includes hundreds of alien…
November 7, 2025 at 2:46 PM
nic221.bsky.social
What you need to know about AI data centers epoch.ai/blog/what-you-… (best clear explanation I’ve seen) #AI #DataCenters #energy
AI's broad climate impact isn't very big (yet) Since AI data centers use a lot of power and water, are they having a big negative environmental impact? Realistically, AI hasn't yet used enough power and water to have broad climate effects. While AI data centers collectively use 1% of total US power, this is still substantially less than air conditioning (12%) and lighting (8%). The story is similar for water. While US data centers directly used around 17.4 billion gallons of water in 2023, agriculture used closer to 36.5 trillion gallons -- around 2,000× higher. Nevertheless, AI data centers could have significant local effects in regions with less energy availability. And in time, AI data centers might start contributing to climate change in a significant way, if they continue to rely on fossil fuels. After all, we project AI data centers could demand 5% of total US electricity generation in 2027, and the data center buildout could continue from there. Overall, we think it's very
November 7, 2025 at 2:04 PM
nic221.bsky.social
AI and the Future of Pedagogy www.sagepub.com/explore-our-co… #AI #education
Text Shot: It critiques defensive, surveillance-based institutional responses to AI and calls for a shift toward transparent, experimental, and mastery-based assessment. It highlights the need for educators to become designers and facilitators of learning environments, and for institutions to ground their use of technology in civic and ethical purposes. Ultimately, the white paper argues for a future-focused pedagogy that prepares students to thrive in an AI-rich world by developing both technical fluency and distinctively human capacities.  Key recommendations include:   Integrate AI where it supports clear pedagogical objectives.   Use AI as a complement to group work, not a substitute.   Build educator involvement into technology design.   Move beyond surveillance to reflective, mastery-based assessment.   Anchor the use of technology in civic and ethical purpose
November 6, 2025 at 7:15 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Getty Images v Stability AI: A landmark High Court ruling on AI, copyright, and trade marks www.technollama.co.uk/getty-images-v… #AI #cooyright
Text Shot: This is a fantastic decision that will be the subject of endless discussion for months to come. It is also likely to be appealed, and we will see what happens then. I would like to commend the judge on an extremely careful and judicious analysis, I’ve been following this case with interest since day one, and I’ve found her rulings astute, her questions direct and to the point, and she’s been capable of removing all of the superfluous nonsense from a very important subject. This would have been a frightening prospect for any judge, but I felt that she understood the technical aspects really well, and managed to convey the reasoning in a concise and competent manner.
November 6, 2025 at 3:09 PM
nic221.bsky.social
AI Data Centres: Let's talk about Water Use www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-data-… #AI #DataCenters (good points)
Chris Preist Professor in Sustainability and Computer... How serious is water use by Al data centres? Looking at the data, it seems this is a 'normal sized development' problem, rather than the exceptional issue that their power demand poses. Here is why.... Al Data Centres: Let's talk about Water Use Chris Preist
November 6, 2025 at 3:00 PM
nic221.bsky.social
The number one sign you're watching an AI video www.bbc.com/future/article… #AI #videos #context
Text Shot: The real solution, according to digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield, is for us all to start thinking differently about what we see online. Looking for the clues AI leaves behind isn't "durable" advice because those clues keep changing, he says. Instead, Caulfield says we have to abandon the idea that videos or images mean anything whatsoever out of context.  "My perspective is that largely video is going to become somewhat like text, long term, where provenance [the origin of the video], not surface features, will be most key, and we might as well prepare for that," Caulfield says.
November 6, 2025 at 2:49 PM
nic221.bsky.social
The Future of AI and Energy sammatey.substack.com/p/the-future-o… (this article covers exactly what I covered in my recent webinar about AI’s Environmental Impact - I’m repeating it on Dec. 5) www.library20.com/ai-s-environme… #AI #environment
However when you look at the real-world data, Al's energy demand surge is relatively tiny compared to the ongoing and exponentially accelerating transformation of humanity's energy system due to cheap clean electricity generation. This is one of the most important events of the 21st century - and may someday be seen as even more important than AI — but it's received relatively little coverage due to its comparatively workaday and undramatic nature.
November 4, 2025 at 4:48 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Overcapacity + Weak Demand = Bubble. AI is not yet a Bubble. engineeringprompts.substack.com/p/overcapacity… #AI #bubbles #future
Overcapacity + Weak Demand = Bubble. AI is not yet a Bubble.
Don't judge a bubble by its looks. Instead, look at the underlying dynamics of capacity and demand.
engineeringprompts.substack.com
November 4, 2025 at 4:37 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Can Agentic Web Browsers Count? - TidBITS tidbits.com/2025/10/30/can… (interesting comparisons) #AI #browsers #agentic
Text Shot: In the end, none of these apps is helpful enough to replace whatever browser you’re currently using. If you’re intrigued by the concept of agentic browsers, try ChatGPT Atlas. It’s a mediocre browser at best—just a watered-down version of Google Chrome—but it does deliver on some of its agentic promises, and it’s interesting to see how it approaches tasks. It also has ChatGPT behind it, which has proven to be the most capable general chatbot for my usage.
November 4, 2025 at 3:51 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Getty Images largely loses landmark UK lawsuit over AI image generator www.reuters.com/sustainability… #AI #copyright
Text Shot: Getty Images largely lost its London lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI over its image generator on Tuesday, prompting Getty and some lawyers to call for stronger protections for copyright owners in Britain.
November 4, 2025 at 3:15 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Hermiston Water Service Agreement with AWS (FAQ) www.hermiston.gov/publicworks/pa… (Amazon doing good for a local community’s water supply) #AI #DataCenters #water
The project will pump water from the Columbia River during low-demand months (October-March) and store it underground near Hermiston, then make it available during high-demand summer months. Amazon Web Services will have access to some of the water to cool their data centers, and the City of Hermiston will see a net increase of 100 million gallons per year in available drinking water for residents Who is paying for this project? AWS is covering all construction costs associated with the water service agreement, including the drilling of aquifer storage and recovery wells and installation of necessary infrastructure. What do Hermiston residents get out of this agreement? Residents will have access to increased drinking water supply and lower costs. AWS will return at least 100 million gallons of potable water annually to the City, helping meet peak summer demand. The agreement is also expected to reduce the cost of water in the city because of increased availability. What effect will this have on the environment and farmers? The agreement helps conserve Columbia River water during peak summer months, benefits fish populations, and provides irrigation water to local small farmers within the Hermiston Irrigation district allowing HID to conserve water supply in Cold Springs Reservoir and extend their irrigation season.
November 4, 2025 at 2:58 PM
Reposted by Nicole Hennig
evcurvefuturist.com
The end of the Oil Age won’t come from scarcity — it’ll come from irrelevance. Solar, wind, and batteries aren’t waiting for permission; they’re simply better.
When the new paradigm outperforms the old on cost, speed, and resilience, history doesn’t argue — it moves on. #EnergyTransition #BESS #EV
November 4, 2025 at 4:50 AM
Reposted by Nicole Hennig
billmckibben.bsky.social
Australia has so much clean energy they're literally giving it away. Meanwhile, GOP is in all-out war to stamp out solar

www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11...
Australian households to get free electricity three hours a day
Saying there is enough solar power for everyone in the daytime, the federal government will direct retailers to provide three hours of free power every day to consumers.
www.abc.net.au
November 4, 2025 at 1:23 AM
nic221.bsky.social
Is it worrying that 95% of AI enterprise projects fail? www.seangoedecke.com/why-do-ai-ente… (another critique of that report) #AI #business
November 3, 2025 at 3:10 PM
nic221.bsky.social
Boston Banning AVs Is an Attack Against Future Generations substack.com/inbox/post/177… #AVs #SelfDriving #safety (excellent points & a dear friend of mine died from a truck crashing into her bicycle last year in Boston)
The implications are staggering. In 2023, an estimated 40,990 people were killed in car crashes in the United States. If autonomous vehicles replaced even half of all human-driven trips at today's demonstrated safety levels, the country could prevent around 20,000 deaths and more than 300,000 serious injuries each year. If adoption reached 90 percent by mid-century—a plausible scenario given current EV and shared-mobility trends— annual road fatalities could fall below 5,000, saving more than 350,000 lives each decade. Globally, where traffic accidents kill 1.3 million people per year, widespread AV use could save over a million lives annually. The economic benefit would be equally profound: crashes cost the U.S. roughly $1 trillion annually in medical bills, lost productivity, and property damage and costs. With AVs these costs could drop to a fraction of current levels. If any medical technology reduced mortality by 80 to 90 percent, governments would fast-track it through approval.
November 3, 2025 at 6:03 AM
nic221.bsky.social
What is electrotech and what will it mean for geopolitics and energy security? electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/what-is-elec… #energy #electrotech
What is electrotech and what will it mean for geopolitics and energy security?
The new “electrotech” revolution is based on energy transition solutions that are driven by physics, economics and geopolitics, not just climate action
electrotechrevolution.substack.com
November 3, 2025 at 5:53 AM