AI Newsletter 2_8_26

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Caleb Bryant

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Feb 8, 2026, 8:42:14 AMFeb 8
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IT HootClub — AI Community Newsletter
Hands-on. Career-focused. Future-ready.
Issued 2026-02-08

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The Learning Loop
DEFINITION Hallucination
In AI, "hallucination" doesn't mean robots are seeing things. It refers to AI models confidently generating incorrect or nonsensical information, presented as fact.
Source: AI Safety Research
TIP Leveraging APIs for Dynamic Prompts
Instead of hardcoding data into your prompts, use APIs to fetch real-time information (weather, stock prices, etc.) for more relevant and up-to-date responses. This makes your prompts adaptable and significantly enhances the accuracy of AI-generated content.
Source: RapidAPI
TOOL Beautiful.ai
AI-powered presentation software that helps you create visually stunning presentations quickly and efficiently, using smart templates and design automation.
Under the Hood
Welcome to this week of "Under the Hood". I have just a few comments this week about the process of creating and generating this newsletter. Regarding the experience of Google's AI Studio, it was sufficient, not necessarily efficient. Since I have made these newsletter posts, I have long since switched to Claude Code. While it still has it's quirks and hangups, it is vastly superior to AI Studio. To be honest, it's not even close. I don't think this is a revelation. I've heard many professional coders say this. I have not experienced GitHub Copilot, but I've heard good things and hope to give that a spin sometime. I have a hard time believing it could exceed my experience with Claude Code. However, we all know that things change quite rapidly in this milieu. At this point, I have kind of hit a wall with regards to this newsletter, that is an AI wall. I am in this quasi automated state, where the letter is generated but I know that revisions are going to be necessary. In fact, just for an example, I am not going to continue to revise this particular newsletter this week. You'll see what I'm talking about. I already had to delete another Virginia AI event that was scraped from the website. This is after I prompted Gemini to only use specifically located events. Remember, I'm using Claude Code for development, but the API Key still points to Gemini. So, Gemini 3.0 Flash is still the model in play here. But, notice "The Nest Jest". There is an automated joke there, but look at the picture. That's not really how I would let this go out. I'd have to look at the terminal logs to see what happened, but I'm guessing that maybe the picture generation step timed out? I did create a batch file (A batch file is basically a tiny script written for the Windows command interpreter — the old-school command line brain called cmd.exe. It’s just a plain text file with a .bat (or .cmd) extension that contains a sequence of commands. When you double-click it, Windows runs those commands in order. No ceremony. No compiler. Just execution. Think of it as automating what you’d otherwise type manually into Command Prompt (ChatGPT, 2026)) to quickly rebuild my newsletter after I've made revisions. I don't know if executing that again would generate an actual image for "The Nest Jest" or if it would just rebuild my newsletter as is. The rebuild batch file allows me to quickly regenerate the newsletter with all the content that is acceptable from the AI generation, but including my manual, or creative, fixes (such as this "Under the Hood" section). If I did not utilize this and simply re-ran the generate_content.py file, the entire Newsletter would regenerate new AI generated content, and likely more bugs/revision requirements. This would fix the problem, by generating a new "The Nest Jest" joke, but likely create new revision requirments. This week's joke isn't all that good anyway, so I maybe would rerun, but for the sake of demonstration, I'll leave it. Plus, I like the "Lift-Off" quote and I don't want that to change. Even though I've hit this stalemate, if you will, I am going to continue to try and think of ways to improve it. I implore anyone with potential solutions or ideas regarding this to reach out to me and or post comments in this newsletter. I will provide any updates regarding this matter. Going forward, I intend to pivot this section a more broad variety of topics. I have moved to a more advanced project and will begin embarking on more AI model training and fine-tuning experiences, which I will comment on. I also intend to provide a kind of a "Fireside Chat" scenario where I provide a specific question I may have asked one of the big three, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and post the response. As I've said, much of my learning as come from working with AI in order to understand. I have gained some great insights from this process and I hope that my sharing them will help others as well. Thanks everyone!!
Lift-Off

“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca — Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He served as an advisor to Emperor Nero and was one of the most influential intellectuals of his time. His philosophical writings emphasized ethics, reason, and resilience in the face of adversity.
The Nest Jest
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Upcoming Events
Event 02/09/2026 6:00 PM
Building AI with a Conscience and Jobs mixer — Madison Central Public Library, 201 West Mifflin St. Room 302, Madison, WI
February is a month for matching up. At MadAI/IEEE our Feb theme is AI match making. We will have people looking for with in AI and have recruiters looking to recruit people in AI. We will also have a wonderful talk by Eric Moore (CIRIS Ethical AI) starting at 6PM and a followup match making after the talk starting at 7pm. Eric's talk abstract: What if AI agents could explain their decisions, recognize their own uncertainty, and ask humans for help when stakes are high? CIRIS is an open-source [Group: madison-ai]
Event 02/10/2026 10:00 AM
2 Days Virtual Hands on Workshop : Multi-Agent AI Systems with Copilot Studio — Online
**2-Day Hands-on Workshop: Crafting Multi-Agent AI Systems & Autonomous Agents with Copilot Studio, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, MCP, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, & Azure AI Foundry** **February 10-11, 2025** **9:00 AM – 5:00 PM (Central)** **Registration Link:** https://dynamicscommunities.com/learning-lab-microsoft-copilot-studio/ **Copilot Studio** is a graphical, low-code tool for both creating an agent—including building automation with Power Automate—and extending a Microsoft 365 Copilot with you [Group: artificialintelligenceandmachinelearning]
Event 02/11/2026 5:15 PM
February Global AI Milwaukee User Group Meeting — Wctc, 800 Main Street, Pewaukee, WI
Agenda Includes: * Networking / Food * Brief Introduction / Discuss Group Business * Featured Speakers Featured Speaker: **Curt Gratz** *Co-Owner of Computer Know How* I am a Co-Owner of Computer Know How, a Wisconsin based technology firm. I have been working with technology systems since 1997 doing software development, architecture and system design. I am a husband to a beautiful wife, dad to 3 great kids, coach of our local CC and track teams, and system architect by day. Topic: **Vectors [Group: global-ai_milwaukee]
Event 2/12/2026
NMDSI Presents Elevating and Accelerating AI Excellence in Southeast Wisconsin — Milwaukee, WI
Corporate Innovators - Northwestern Mutual Commons - Grand Hall, 805 East Mason St, Milwaukee, WI 53202
Source: Choose MKE Tech
In the News
News 2026-02-04 — Wired
A New AI Math Startup Just Cracked 4 Previously Unsolved Problems
Axiom, an AI startup, has reportedly found solutions to four previously unsolved math problems. This achievement signals the steadily advancing reasoning capabilities of AI technology. read more
News 2026-02-04 — Wired
Mistral's New Ultra-Fast Translation Model Gives Big AI Labs a Run for Their Money
Mistral, a French startup, has developed a new ultra-fast translation model. The company is taking a different approach than major US AI companies, focusing on efficiency. read more
News 2026-02-04 — Wired
HHS Is Making an AI Tool to Create Hypotheses About Vaccine Injury Claims
The Health Department is developing an internal AI tool to analyze vaccine injury claims. Concerns exist that this tool may be used to further anti-vaccine agendas. read more
This newsletter was assembled with an AI-assisted workflow prototype for internal preview.
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