Weekly Review 20 February 2026

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon, Threads, Newsmast, and Bluesky):

1. Europe and the Middle East are lagging behind in preparing data centres for AI: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/ai_datacenters_bcs/
2. Like most tools that make workers more efficient, giving employees AI tools results in them doing more work: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/ai_makes_employees_work_harder/
3. The security threats that are posed by AI: https://www.informationweek.com/cybersecurity/slamming-the-door-on-ai-based-cybersecurity-threats
4. The British military is integrating more AI into its kill chain: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/mod_project_asgard/
5. Using AI doesn't necessarily save time when making movies: https://arstechnica.com/features/2026/02/why-darren-aronofsky-thought-an-ai-generated-historical-docudrama-was-a-good-idea/
6. The benefits and risks of AI companions: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-companion-harm-benefit
7. How many AI coding agents does it take to write a C compiler? 16, and it's not a hard task: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/sixteen-claude-ai-agents-working-together-created-a-new-c-compiler/
8. AI are helping to synthesise new materials: https://www.hpcwire.com/bigdatawire/2026/02/11/from-prediction-to-production-mits-ai-system-helps-synthesize-new-materials/
9. A court case is thrown out by the judge after a lawyer keeps abusing AI in their filings: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-from-losing-case-over-ai-errors/
10. AI are not good at giving medical advice: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/09/ai_chatbots_medical_advice_sucks/
11. The USA can't expect to dominate AI for ever: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/09/us-tech-ai-companies-gulf-states
12. Using AI to caricature yourself leaks information that threatens your security: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/ai_caricatures_social_media_bad_security/
13. SMOTE can be used to correct class imbalances when training AI, but it must be used correctly: https://www.kdnuggets.com/why-most-people-misuse-smote-and-how-to-do-it-right
14. While AI can help make meetings more efficient, I doubt they could make them less boring: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4127434/qa-how-ai-could-transform-corporate-meetings-for-better-or-worse.html
15. As AI takes on more professional roles, people are retraining in trades: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/11/big-ai-job-swap-white-collar-workers-ditching-their-careers
16. Another AI data centre is refused construction permission because of environmental concerns: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/edinburgh_green_ai_datacenter/
17. Using AI to design chips for AI: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/cadences_agentic_chip_design_tool/
18. Why AI companions are so appealing to people: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-companion-relationships
19. The economics around putting AI data centres into space are not looking good: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/why-the-economics-of-orbital-ai-are-so-brutal/
20. Some AI systems being rolled out could be left legally unusable due to regulation: https://www.informationweek.com/machine-learning-ai/state-ai-regulations-could-leave-cios-with-unusable-systems
21. AI can now translate language as well as the average human translator, but not as well as more experienced translators: https://spectrum.ieee.org/chatgpt-translate-skills-human-comparison
22. AI can now provide real-time translation in phone calls: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/11/tmobile_network_ai_translate_live_calls/
23. A short history of OpenClaw, the vibe coded AI: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4128257/openclaw-the-ai-agent-thats-got-humans-taking-orders-from-bots.html
24. AI are now as creative as the average human, for some areas: https://dataconomy.com/2026/02/10/ai-models-outperform-average-human-creativity-in-new-study/
25. A proposed market place for licensing media to AI companies: https://dataconomy.com/2026/02/11/amazon-plans-ai-licensing-platform-for-publishers-via-aws/