Links for 16 May 2026

previously: Links for 8 May 2026

The New Revolution in Military Affairs by Andriy Zagorodnyuk. Ukraine is championing a distributed, bottom-up innovation model with hundreds of firms and volunteer groups, close integration between frontline units and manufacturers, and research-and-development activity embedded directly in combat formations. Russia, by contrast, pursues a centralized approach…

Open and Closed: The Pursuit of Frontier Models by Stephen O’Grady. At a recent industry event, an AI executive likened the open models chasing their closed frontier counterparts to a pack of wolves…. Whether open will compete with closed, then, is not the interesting question. It always has, it always will. The question to ask is instead: how well? Put another way, will the “pack of wolves” ever catch their prey, and if so, how quickly?

A Speech to Europe 2026 »The European Moment« by Anne Applebaum. (also at What, actually, is European Civilization? but, you know, Substack.)

Influential study touting ChatGPT in education retracted over red flags by Jeremy Hsu. Since its publication, the study has been cited 262 times in other papers published by Springer Nature’s peer-reviewed journals and received a total of 504 citations from both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources. It also attracted nearly half a million readers and received enough online attention to rank in the 99th percentile for journal articles in terms of attention score.

You can absolutely have an RSS dependent website in 2026 on matduggan.com. (fwiw, if you really want to get my feed as an email newsletter, use Feedrabbit - RSS and Atom web feed to email service. Just go to their site and paste in the URL of my site, welcome to my newsletter.

Newsmedia is the original everything app by Aram Zucker-Scharff. The model of American news organizations was always to be the home base for everything you did. Local events, business announcements, local news, national news, international wire service news. Ads made sense in that package because they were part of the service, they were also providing you with information about your community and things you wanted to know, just from a different angle.

The Hyperlocal Economics Nobody Wants to Admit by Yoni Greenbaum. (Only 17% of people in the USA have paid for any news product in the past year. What are these small-town news sites doing differently?)

No § 230 Immunity for Meta’s AI-Generated Ads by Eugene Volokh. These averments, taken as true, evidence a fact dispute over whether Meta contribute[d] materially to the alleged illegality of the advertisements. The alleged illegality stems from the advertisements’ content—i.e., the false statements made to Facebook and Instagram users that induced them to click on the ads. Plaintiffs have averred that Meta participated in the construction of the ads by literally generating, using artificial intelligence, the images and text in the advertisements. That degree of participation is not protected by section 230. (prediction: Google and Meta are going to set up the “AI” ad generation tools with a cut-out layer so they can claim the ad is the work of an “agency,” kind of like how Amazon.com uses “delivery partners” to be responsible for van crashes.)