"I'm not ready to put an officer in a Tesla."A little over a year on the market, drivers have been finding all kinds of uses for Cybertrucks. They've turned out to be handy paperweights, and they make lovely snowman, as well as a nice place to store your eggs.One anonymous patron is hoping they make great police cruisers as well, after the Las Vegas Metro Police Department announced it acquired ten of the infamous EVs via a generous donation. While the majority will be fitted for light patrol work, at least one will be fitted out as a SWAT vehicle, the LVMPD said.For its part, the police department is confident the new fleet will go over well, with LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill calling them "badass.""The cop inside will be safe no matter what, it will stop bullets," McMahill boasted. "This is also a tremendous recruitment tool."McMahill's faith in the EV to stop bullets is laudable, especially given the cybertruck windshield's strange habit of shattering when wiped with a cloth, nevermind actual gunfire. Maybe he's right to be confident after seven recalls in just over a year, one would hope Tesla has worked out all the kinks.The Vegas Sheriff's attitude is a notable break from his fellow cops across the country, whose experiments using Teslas have failed spectacularly.Nowhere has that been more apparent than Nevada's western brother, California. Following governor Gavin Newsom's statewide mandate to transition all California vehicles to zero-emission, a number of departments have deployed various Tesla models to their fleets. The results range from mild inconveniences to outright dysfunction.In Menlo, California, police chief David Norris noted that Tesla's are far from the "patrol cars of the future."A report on the use of the vehicles noted that officers liked the acceleration, steering, and speed of the EVs, but found significant issues as soon as the cruisers had to go offroad. Their size is also a cause of concern for gadget-laden first responders."The equipment overhangs the passenger seat making it nearly unusable," the report reads. "In particular, the passenger seat space would not allow training officers to comfortably sit next to a trainee for a 12-hour shift, preventing field training for new officers. The rear seats provide very little room for anyone detained or transported in the back of the car."Meanwhile, Ukiah Police Chief Cedric Crook told SF Gate that "I'm not ready to put an officer in a Tesla."Evidently, the rear seats are only big enough to fit one mirandized passenger at a time, and there were major concerns over charging, especially while transporting arrestees.Ukiah's Model 3s will instead serve as transport vehicles for administrative staff, after a lengthy six-month modification due to the lack of auto shops with knowledge of outfitting Teslas for emergency use.A little farther north, police in Spokane, Washington found that outfitting Tesla Model Ys for duty was a mixed bag, as adding a laptop mount obscures the EV's touchscreen dashboard. The vehicle's distinctive design also foiled any rear-cabin modifications for transporting arrestees, while larger officers struggled with the Y's lacking leg room.Only time will tell whether Las Vegas will have any more luck with its shiny new Cybertrucks. If their performance in civilian hands is any indication, Vegas police might be in for a bumpy ride.Share This Article

Image by Hector Mata / AFP via Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsThe passing of actor and Hollywood icon Gene Hackmanwas tragic enough.But now his death, alongwith his wife, classical musician Betsy Arakawa, has been labelled "suspicious" by investigators, NBC News reports.On Wednesday, Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 64, were found dead in their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with one of the couple's dogs.While initial reports stated that foul play had been ruled out by police which they still maintain detectives in a recently released search warrant wrote that Hackman and Arakawa's deaths are "suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation," as quoted by NBC.The grim discovery was made by a maintenance worker who checked inside the household after noticing that the couple's front door was left open. Investigators who arrived at the scene found Hackman's body lying in a mudroom, while Arakawa was found on a bathroom floor with a space heater near her head. The deceased dog was discovered in Arakawa's closet, while two others on the property were still alive: one in the bathroom, and another outside.A deputy noted that Hackman appeared to have suddenly fallen. In the bathroom where Arakawa was found, a bottle of pills was spilled on the countertop. It's possible that the space heater "could have fallen in the event the female abruptly fell to the ground," the deputy said, per NBC.The fire department found no signs of a carbon monoxide leak or poisoning, according to the warrant, which quickly emerged as theories that could explain the grisly scene. One detective notes, however, that such a cause of death can be difficult to detect, . Nearby gas lines were tested by New Mexico Gas Company, but no issues were found with any of the pipes.Neither body showed obvious signs of trauma, police said, stressing that it's still early into the investigation."The autopsy is going to tell us more,"Santa Fe county sheriff Adan Menda . Hackman, a two-time Oscar winner, confirmed his retirement from acting in 2008, ending a legendary career spanning more than four decades. He boasted a singular screen presence somewhere between a leading man and character actor, excelling at both. He brought vigor and an often buried sense of humanity to all his roles, no matter how larger than life. Deceptively versatile, his trademark wry smirk and gritty mug were equally suited for dogged bastards, moody messes, and sneering villains. No one can forget the palpable desperation he brought to his now genre-defining performance as tough-as-nails cop Popeye in "The French Connection" (1971). Hackman was also effortless in comedic roles, like in what was his veritable swan song as a blundering head of a family in "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001).Fellow industry legend and New Hollywood trailblazer Francis Ford Coppola grieved Hackman's passing."The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman, a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity," Coppola, who directed Hackman in the Palme d'Or winning film "The Conversation" (1974), wrote on Instagram. "I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution."More on Hollywood: NASA Posts Touching Tribute to the Late David LynchShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsThe United States just had its first measles death in a decade, the Associated Press reports, a grim inflection point as the extremely contagious yet easily preventable respiratory disease continues to spread nationwide.According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, the "school-aged child" was "not vaccinated" before being hospitalized after testing positive for measles.As of this week, there have been 124 confirmed cases since late January in Texas, most of which are affecting children. 18 people have been hospitalized in the state so far, according to the agency.The outbreak has since spread, with nine cases being confirmed in Lea County, New Mexico, which borders Texas.Further cases have been observed in Alaska, California, Georgia, New Jersey, New York City and Rhode Island, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) literally coast to coast, and that's just the ones we know about."This death underscores the real danger of measles it's a severe disease that can take lives despite being preventable with vaccination," epidemiologist John Brownstein told ABC News.According to the World Health Organization, measles vaccinations have averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023. Despite the availability of a "safe and cost-effective vaccine," there have been over 100,000 measles deaths around the world, mostly "among unvaccinated or under vaccinated children under the age of five years."The disease was declared eliminated from the US in 2000 thanks to a nationwide vaccination program.Of course, that was then. Nowadays, newly-confirmed Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine critic, is attempting to downplay the severity of the situation, arguing that "it's not unusual" during this week's Cabinet meeting, as quoted by ABC News."We have measles outbreaks every year,"he said.The CDC recommends that children should get two doses of a widely-available measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine.But low vaccination rates continue to be a problem in the US, particularly in religious communities that oppose inoculation.According to state health department spokesperson Lara Anton, the West Texas measles cases were concentrated in a "close-knit, undervaccinated" Mennonite community, the Associated Press reports.Meanwhile, Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency has also gutted the US Agency for International Development, putting potentially lifesaving scientific research into HIV/AIDS vaccines on ice.Share This Article

The United Arab Emirates' so-called "spy sheikh" controls a whopping $1.5 trillion in wealth and he's funneling a colossal stream of it into AI, making him one of the world's most powerful figures in the space.As the Wall Street Journal reports, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan the son of the UAE's founder and brother to its crown prince, and at one time a top contender for the throne himself has already swiftly begun achieving his dream of becoming a global AI power player thanks to MGX, his mysterious AI investment vehicle.Launched in 2024, this "investment fund of the future" boasts $100 billion in investments from Tahnoon, who along with possessing a purportedly vast personal fortune is the head of two Emirati wealth funds that put him in control of more than quadruple Elon Musk's net worth,which stands at roughly $356 billion.While we don't know much about the exactitudes of MGX's projects, the Abu Dhabi-based fund briefly went viral in January after being announced as one of the investors backing Stargate, President Donald Trump's new $500 billion AI initiative. Shortly thereafter, people began buying up stock in a company that uses "MGX" as its ticker which turned out to belong to Metagenomi, a California-based biotech startup, and not the Emirati AI fund.Beyond that, most of the sheikh's public profile involves either "Hydra," the chess computer he poured money into in the early-to-mid-2000s or his family's corruption scandals, which include allegations of widespread human rights abuses and illegal financial practices so egregious, it earned the confederation of Arab states a recurring spot on the United Nations' "black list."If none of that was sketchy enough, Tahnoon is also an advisor to the Emirates' national security apparatus,where he's been implicated in spycraft, including the distribution of a messaging app that US officials alleged was used to eavesdrop on users.Despite those concerns, Musk and the Trump administration seem more than happy to jump into bed with Tahnoon and the feeling seems to be very mutual.Ahead of the presidential election last year, the sheikh flew to the United States to meet with the South African-born billionaire at his Giga Texas factory and was seen posing outdoors a major thing for Tahnoon, who suffers from an eye condition that requires he wear sunglasses even indoors in jeans and a t-shirt instead of his traditional Emirati prince's garb. Though the specifics of that discussion weren't publicized, it seems highly unlikely that the moneyed pair talked about the UAE's well-documented record of torturing migrant workers.While Tahnoon is most certainly not the only purported human rights criminal to be investing big in AI, he's perhaps one of the most prominent ones ever to do so though in the eyes of these American benefactors, that may be a good thing.More on weird AI investors: Theres Something Very Weird About This $30 Billion AI Startup by a Man Who Said Neural Networks May Already Be ConsciousShare This Article

You can even watch its thought process.To prepare to take over the real world, AI models are first conquering virtual ones.On Tuesday, Anthropic kicked off its Twitch livestream titled "Claude Plays Pokmon." Without human intervention, the Google-backed startup's latest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, explores the world of Pokmon Red, doing its best to beat Nintendo's classic RPG for the Game Boy, released in the halcyon days of 1998.And it's not doing too badly, either. So far, Claude 3.7 has managed to clinch three Gym Leader badges, most recently besting Lt. Surge at the Vermilion City Gym. That's considerably better than Claude 3.5, which had stalled at Pallet Town, the game's starting area. Endearingly, Claude 3.7 even gives nicknames to its roster of battling creatures, christening its choice of starter Pokmon, Squirtle, as "Shell."Video games ranging from Minecraft to Goat Simulator have become a popular way of testing agentic AI models, or AI models that can autonomously interact with a given environment.In the case of Pokmon, the game's turn-based combat, not to mention simple dialog options, make an ideal testing ground for the LLM's newly-boasted "reasoning" capabilities. There's a limited number of options available to the player, making the challenge approachable.Viewers of the livestream can witness Claude'sreal-time thought process in a window next to the gameplay, providing some amusing insights."It appears a wild Pokmon encounter has started when I moved!" reads the AI's ersatz stream of consciousness. "Let me press 'a' to advance through this unusual dialogue and prepare for battle. I'll lead with SPIKE who is at full health."That said, the AI's thought process as it navigates the game's open world portions can be painstakingly circuitous. TechCrunch notes an instance where Claude was stumped by a rock wall that it kept trying to walk through, taking forever to realize that it could simply path around the minor obstacle.According to Anthropic, Claude mainly sees the world by analyzing a constant stream of screenshots of the game though often erroneously, the startup admits. It also can read the game's memory, gleaning information like the player's coordinates.And in what is the biggest upgrade from its predecessor, Claude 3.7 keeps an ever-changing "knowledge base" to store notes about its gameplay as it goes along, like where things are, or what sequence to press buttons in to execute certain game mechanics.Actually controlling the game, meanwhile, is accomplished by a custom interface that lets Claude press virtual buttons, Anthropic said, along with a pathfinding tool that helps the model determine how to move from location to location.Clunkiness and laborious pace notwithstanding, watching the AI model stumble around and occasionally succeed can be an oddly fascinating spectacle. If nothing else, it's a nostalgic trip down memory lane or anShare This Article

Multi-hypenate billionaire and unelected White House advisor Elon Musk has been accused of unabashedly enriching himself on the dime of American taxpayers while slashing funding across a growing number of agencies.And that conflict of interest is about to really be put to the test. As the Washington Post reports, the Federal Aviation Administration which was recently gutted by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency is considering cancelling a $2.4 billion, 15-year contract that was awarded to Verizon in 2023, and hand it to Musk's SpaceX instead.The contract's goal was to upgrade the platform that allows air traffic control facilities and the FAA to communicate with each other, an extremely important piece of infrastructure that could soon get a massive upgrade or be thrown into chaos and mismanagement.According to WaPo's sources, the Verizon contract could be soon handed to Starlink, SpaceX's satellite internet constellation in low-Earth orbit, yet another glaring sign that Musk is greedily wielding his newfound influence to pad out his bottom line.It's an already precarious situation, following a disastrous plane crash that killed 67 people earlier this year. Just over a week earlier, the Trump administration hadeliminated all membersof a key aviation security advisory group, andfrozen all hiring at the FAA, including key air traffic controllers.Musk took aim at Verizon earlier this week, arguing in a tweet that its "system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk."Critics, however, have since pointed out Musk's enormous conflict of interest."Because of Musks current position in DOGE and his closeness to Trump, he and his company are getting an advantage and getting a contract," Santa Clara University ethics center director John Pelissero told WaPo."Whos looking out for the public interest here when you get the person whos cutting budgets and personnel from the FAA, suddenly trying to benefit from still another government contract?" he added.Former FAA officials told the Associated Press they were "alarmed at the prospect of Starlink being used as a critical part of the nations aviation system without adequate testing, review and debate about its benefits and drawbacks."The news comes after Bloomberg reported that Musk had authorized a shipment of 4,000 Starlink terminals to the FAA.The agency has since told WaPo in a statement that "no decisions have been made" regarding the existing Verizon project.But early signs of a SpaceX takeover at the FAA are already apparent. According to the newspaper, a number of SpaceX employees have been working from within the regulator for days, where they've even been given FAA email addresses.The agency also revealed that it was already testing Starlink systems to provide more reliable connectivity in parts of the country."Were going to look at a year, year-and-a-half time frame and do massive upgrades, improve the systems, help air traffic controllers, keep our skies safer," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News.Musk has already been gutting agencies in charge of investigating SpaceX, as well as his EV maker Tesla.That's despite Musk and his businesses collecting at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the last 20 or so years, as the WaPo reported earlier this week.Massive conflict of interest aside, the FAA's communications network is in dire need of an upgrade. A 2023 safety review already found that technical shortcomings were proving "challenging."But ripping up the Verizon contract could actually cost the government far more, not just in fees associated with termination but possible litigation as well, which could fly directly in the face of DOGE's alleged goals of slashing wasteful spending."When the government terminates a contract its not like it shuts off the spigot," George Washington University associate dean for government and procurement law studies Jessica Tillipman told WaPo. "Its expensive to wind down a contract. Its very expensive and its complicated."Share This Article

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a lunar lander from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday, kicking off the latest attempt to touch down on the Moon's surface.Houston-based startup Intuitive Machines' lander, dubbed Athena, is equipped with various scientific instruments, including a tiny "hopper" robot, three separate rovers and a drill.The drill was designed to burrow roughly three feet below the Moon's surface and drop the retrieved soil into a pile nearby. A mass spectrometer will then analyze the excavated samples for signs of frozen water, among other chemical compounds.The drill is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which is dedicated to helping the agency "explore the Moon as it prepares for human missions."As such, if Athena's drill were to detect significant amounts of water ice near the Moon's tallest mountain, Mons Mouton, which is only roughly 37 miles from the south pole, it could have considerable implications for NASA's upcoming crewed landings as part of its Artemis program.Athena will also be carrying a rover, called the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), which will test out the first-ever cellphone network on the Moon through a partnership with Finnish telecom and consumer electronics company Nokia.The lander's much smaller "hopper" robot will feature thrusters to allow it to cover long distances. It will attempt to communicate with MAPP with the help of an antenna before exploring the shadowed regions of a nearby crater.The plan is for Athena to touch down on the Moon on March 6. But considering Intuitive Machines' first attempt last year ended in its Odysseus lander tripping on a rock and falling over during landing, the stakes are high.It's an unusually busy time, with two other robotic landers other than Athena also en route to the Moon.Firefly Aerospace's lander, dubbed Blue Ghost, is headed towards Mare Crisium, a massive basin on the Moon's near side. Earlier this week, the lander captured striking close-up views of the lunar surface. The goal is to attempt to land in the early hours of Sunday.Japanese space company ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 2 was launched on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Blue Ghost on January 15. Its Resilience lander and accompanying Tenacious micro rover will attempt to land near a basaltic plain on the far side of the Moon later this spring.Despite the flurry of activity, now that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has gained considerable influence over NASA and the rest of the country NASA's long-planned crewed missions to the surface of the Moon could be in peril. Both Musk and president Donald Trump have voiced their desire to send humans to the surface of Mars instead, undermining the space agency's Artemis program.Where that leaves Intuitive Machines' attempt to probe the lunar surface for signs of water ice is up in the air but given the many failed Moon landings over the last several years, surviving the descent in one piece is far from a guarantee anyway.More on lunar landers: NASA Spacecraft Shoots Japanese Moon Lander With LaserShare This Article

Elon Musk is apparently headed to "The Daily Show" where his interview with Jon Stewart will air unedited.News of this all-star showdown comes fresh on the heels of Stewart's return to the small screen, which saw the satirical host delivering an anti-Musk tirade so fiery that he smashed a mug and injured his hand in the process.That incredible moment during Stewart's Monday night show came as he took the billionaire not-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to task for sacking roughly 30,000 federal workers in the name of saving money."How about we just close down the carried interest loophole on hedge funds thats worth $1.3 billion a year?" Stewart suggested during the impassioned segment. "Oh, how about we stop the $2 trillion weve given to defense contractors to build a fighter jet that blows, when everybody knows the next war is going to be fought with drones and blockchain, whatever that is, holy sh*t!"Unsurprisingly, Musk's fanboys began calling for their dear leader's rebuttal after he was owned so thoroughly by Stewart. He replied to one such stan by promising "will do it if the show airs unedited" and it looks like he may get his wish."We'd be delighted!" the show responded from its X account, putting the ball in Musk's court and seemingly agreeing to his terms.Stewart may be a comedian, but he has a long history of coming into interviews after doing extraordinary preparation research and disemboweling blowhards like Musk.Those whose birth years don't begin with a "20" may recall that more than two decades ago, Stewart destroyed then-CNN host Tucker Carlson when appearing as a guest on "Crossfire," the conservative talking head's old political debate show. With guns blazing, the late-night legend said he refused to be the show's "monkey" when Carlson asked him why he wasn't being funny, and proceeded to call the perennially confused bowtie-wearer a "dick" right to his face.And that's without getting into Stewart's famed debate with the later-disgracedFoxNews personality Bill O'Reilly or any of his scorching exchanges on the "Daily Show" or his short-lived "The Problem With Jon Stewart," where he gained an even harsher reputation for guillotining political figures with strong opinions and few facts to back them up.If that description sounds familiar these days, Musk may want to back out like he did with the cage match he agreed to have with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.While there's not much more information about this slated interview at press time, it's clear that "The Daily Show" means business. If Musk actually does sit down to talk to Stewart, the newly-returned host is almost certainly going to show him and America who's boss.More on Stewart's battle fuel: Elon Musk Has Sucked Up $38 Billion in Aid From the Federal Government, and Now He's Slashing That Help for OthersShare This Article

Palpable hatred for Elon Musk seems to be everywhere you look this week, from viral ads to Tesla's plummeting stock value.Across the pond in London Town, a group of anti-Musk crusaders operating under the handle "Everyone Hates Elon" have erected a bus stop ad that features the billionaire doing his infamous "Sieg Heil" salute and calls Teslas "Swasticars," both serving as allusions to the unelected political wrecker's increasingly far-right politics and activities."Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds," the ad's copy reads a reference to the year Nazi Germany invaded Poland, thus sparking off World War II.In the days since the guerrilla group behind the "Swasticar" ad posted videos of it on Instagram and TikTok, their biting missive has been viewed and shared millions of times all while Tesla's value spirals ever downward thanks in part to Musk's wrecking ball approach at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).As market summaries show, Tesla's stock has crashed tremendously in recent days amid an overall market drop and historically low sales numbers in Europe. Though Donald Trump's presidential win last November delivered a spike in value that drove Tesla stock up to an all-time high of $436 per share, it's since plummeted, hitting $360 per share on February 20 and just under $291 by the close of markets on Wednesday.As Business Insider reports, even finance bros that used to be in Tesla's corner now seem convinced that Musk's headlong foray into politics is harming his brand."The worry of [Wall Street] is that Musk dedicating so much time (even more than we expected) to DOGE takes away from his time at Tesla in such a crucial moment and year for the company," Tesla-stanning Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in an investor note viewed by BI.In a lengthy post on Musk's social network, financial advisor and Tesla investor Gary Black admitted that he had been "wrongly bullish" on the EV company for years. Though he danced around the heart of the matter and refused to outright criticize the company's CEO, the Future Fund managing partner said he hopes to "learn from [his] mistakes" when forecasting stock success, which seems like financespeak for throwing one's hands up in the air.By all accounts, Musk's politicking has not only harmed his business' image, but also hurt his bottom line a sign, if there ever was one, that the free market capitalism he and his cronies espouse may not always work in their favor.Share This Article

Pinterest, the web's de facto mood board, has long been one of the best places for finding and sharing aspirational lifestyle imagery: sumptuous meals, beautiful art and interiors, fashion and beauty inspiration, and an endless list of do-it-yourself home and holiday projects.Or at least it was. These days, the site is engulfed in a torrent of uncanny AI-generated slop, drowning out the real, human-made content that once thrived there.Slop is everywhere on Pinterest, frequently ranking in the top results for common searches. It persists across classic Pinterest categories like home inspiration and DIY hacks, fashion, beauty, food and recipes, art, architecture, and more and often links back to AI-powered content farming sites that masquerade as helpful blogs, using Pinterest as a tool to draw in viewers to useless chum content just to cash in on lucrative display ads.Pinterest users are frustrated, saying the AI onslaught is making the platform less useful and harder to navigate. But SEO spammers powering Pinterest's slopageddon say they're raking in cash.Take a search for "healthy recipe ideas." Of the first dozen pins returned, at least six including the very first result are AI-generated. Only one was explicitly labeled as synthetic.The uncanny posts almost all linked back to recipes on spammy websites, frequently helmed by faux food bloggers with AI-generated "headshots."For instance, look at the so-called blogger and cookbook author behind that top result, a "pineapple chicken and rice" dish. Though the blog postis attributed to a byline simply reading "Sharlene," an author bio to the right of the recipe claims that the person supposedly operating the site is a "passionate cook and busy mom" named "Alice." Alice also has no last name, and her profile pic is clearly AI.A prominent red button, affixed beneath the fake author's bio, implores site visitors to "Follow Me on Pinterest."The same phenomenon persisted on other common food-related searches, like "best casserole recipes." Once again, AI-generated images of phony food linking back to AI-powered blog posts were scattered throughout the top pins.In this case, none were flagged by Pinterest as generated by AI.We found AI seeping into the top results for nearly every search we attempted, from "gothic architecture" to "fantasy concept art" to many specific hairstyles ranging from "long layered haircut" to "pixie cut ideas."The site's AI creep spans topics and keywords, and it can blend in surprisingly well, with AI-generated imagery melting seamlessly at a first glance, anyway into the aesthetics of the site's human-made content.A search for "DIY shelving ideas," for example, seemed free of AI at first glance. But when we zoomed in on a few cozy-looking shelving solutions packed with lush plants and stacks of books, we noticed something was off: none of the books had actual titles, and instead simply bore word-ish markings relaying only a fuzzy vibeof a book spine.Once again, one of these AI-generated images was the very first result in the feed, and none were flagged by the platform or posters as AI-generated.Like clockwork, when we clicked through to the link associated with that top result, we found ourselves on yet another AI-generated blog post. This one was published on a website titled Recipes Time, with a subheadline reading "Healthy Choices with Amelia."Amelia, according to a bio on the right side of the page, is said to be a cook. She was "born with a spoon in one hand," it claims, and a "recipe book in the other." Again, though, she has no last name and the bio's associated image, which depicts a smiling family of three, is dotted with telltale AI artifacts, like hands with too many fingers.DIY shelving, of course, has nothing to do with recipes. Neither does travel, another subcategory of content found on Recipes Time. Then again, though, Recipes Time isn't designed to help provide useful information from real experts explaining how to install new shelves or cook a healthy dinner, for that matter. Instead, a scroll through Recipes Time reveals an expansive catalog of AI-generated articles spanning Pinterest-favorite categories, packed with images that appear to be expressly designed for algorithmic success on the platform.Put simply, it's AI-generated SEO spam at its finest. Or, from the position of Pinterest's users and creators, at its worst.Dissatisfaction with the site's descent into slopdom is clear across the web, where users lament that the platform's inability to curb AI creep is eroding Pinterest's usefulness."I was looking for hair color inspo and it was all AI. I couldn't find a single human!!" one dispirited netizen exclaimed in a Reddit post. "Then [I] typed in nail inspo, interior design same thing. Is this platform dead?""Every time I search for examples of stuff for my albums it's filled with AI fake pics," lamented another Pinterest-soured Redditor. "I come to Pinterest for real-world examples. It has become garbage."One frustrated Pinterest user who complained about the service, Josh, says he used to browse the platform "every other day" or so usually for art and wallpapers, but sometimes for recipes or DIY ideas."It's just like finding needles in haystacks now for real art," he told Futurism, adding that the deluge of AI has "devalued" his experience and made it more difficult to find and support human artists and creators.Pinterest "was a pretty good place to find genuine art from artists," Josh told us.But the "genuine art that I would once explore more of," he continued, is now "just AI in abundance."***Jesse Cunningham, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a digital marketer with SEO expertise, is one of the many folks using AI to flood Pinterest with AI-generated content for ad cash. We know so because Cunningham is an avid YouTuber, and has published multiple YouTube videos in which he breaks down exactly how where he promises viewers that they can make thousands of dollars a month by following his lead."I'm talking $10,000 per month on Pinterest... using AI images, using AI text," Cunningham says to kick off one of his videos, which is titled " $10,000/Month using AI Pinterest" and was published in December.Cunningham shows a screenshot of an impressive Pinterest Analytics chart,which he says showcases a steep uptick in his pins' success as the result of his AI use."This graph right here shows you when we started AI do you see the arrow right there? We started using AI on this Pinterest account and you can see the outbound clicks these are outbound clicks, up to almost 5,000 per day," Cunningham triumphantly declares. "That's real traffic, real money going to a website off of this strategy."Cunningham then breaks down his process, which involves astonishingly little effort on his part.First he uses ChatGPT to drum up some post ideas and URL slugs; then using a low-effort AI text-generating platform dubbed "Content Goblin," he inputs a few words into a text box and, moments later, returns lengthy, Pinterest-optimized recipes and listicles, complete with AI-spun imagery.The AI-generated articles, he explains, are then published to a website featuring another fake author. Cunningham's fake blogger is named "Mary," and he has a whole other videodedicated to showing followers how they can spin up their own fake site which, we couldn't help but notice, looks strikingly similar to the ones we found on Pinterest.Lastly, after a bit more ChatGPT fiddling, Cunningham uses yet another AI service to quickly generate a slew of clickworthy-looking pins, each overlaid with bolded headline text.According to Cunningham, quantity is the name of the game."If you want to dominate, you need a lot of rods, a lot of lines in the water, like you're fishing," he says. "I want as many hooks in the water as I want. That's why we do so many pins."Cunningham also showcases his AI-generated pins on his website, where under a headline reading "AI PINTEREST = HUGE OPPORTUNITY," he markets an AI Pinterest "masterclass.""AI has advanced to the point where you can generate stunning, professional-quality pins with just a few clicks," reads a webpage for the course. "And every pin you see on this page? Created using AI.""And the best part?" it continues. "Each of these pins takes less thanoneminute to create."We reached out to Cunningham with a list of questions about his Pinterest strategy. We included questions about the ethics of his AI strategy, asking whether he believes publishing AI-generated content under fake author bylines is fair to Pinterest users looking to find helpful content and if he takes any issue with the notion that his use of AI to "dominate" Pinterest results by publishing as much content as possible is doing a disservice to real bloggers and creators that use the site to support their businesses. We also asked whether he personally tests any of the recipes he generates using AI before publishing them.We didn't hear back.***In the face of all this, Pinterest hasn't moved to ban AI. Instead, it recently introduced a suite of ad-focused AI tools for marketers who want to rapidly create ads for products using AI.We reached out to Pinterest with a list of questions about this story. In response, the company insisted that AI isn't widespread on its platform, and defended its embrace of AI."Impressions on generative AI content make up a small percentage of the total impressions on Pinterest," read the emailed statement. "As people continue experimenting with generative AI content, we are working to provide users with more control and context over the content they see on Pinterest. Pinterest will continue intentionally leveraging AI, such as our inclusive AI features, to enhance the experience for our users and creators."Josh, for his part, told us that he'd like to see Pinterest give users like him more control over whether AI is present in their feeds, or at least find a way to reliably mark pins as AI-generated. Pinterest's inability or unwillingness to curb its AI problem, he said, is increasingly pushing him to other platforms."I use other sites that host wallpapers and artwork such as WallHaven, and while they too have AI content they at least allow users to set a filter to hide/show it," he told us, while"Pinterest is just a firehose with no way of stopping it."Like Facebook's AI-mangled fake veterans and shrimp Jesuses, or Instagram's since-killed AI-powered fake users, or Google's ever-worsening AI corrosion, Pinterest's inescapable slop problem poses an urgent question: whois the internet even for anymore?Right now, in Pinterest's case, the answer seems to be that it's for AI spammers, instead of users or good-faith creators which in turn, means a worse internet for everyone.More on AI slop: "True Crime" YouTube Channel Busted as Pure, Made-Up AI SlopShare This Article

Last month, US State Department documents came to light showing plans to spend $400 million on "Armored Tesla" vehicles.The optics were bad, to say the least. The planned spending appeared to be one of the most glaring examples yet of Tesla CEO and unelected White House advisor Elon Musk's enormous conflict of interest.Department staffers quickly edited the item to read "armored electric vehicles" instead. Officials also tried to distance the agency from the brewing controversy, saying in a statement that the contract is "on hold and there are no current plans to issue it."Given the date of the document, reports at the time suggested that the line item predated Trump's second term, and was the result of the Biden administration asking the State Department to "explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles," as a State Department spokesperson told The Hill earlier this month.But now, new reporting by NPR has blown the case wide open. According to a State Department document obtained by the broadcaster, Biden's State Department planned to spend just $483,000 in 2025 to buy electric vehicles, on top of $3 million for other equipment, including chargers.That's less than one percent of the $400 million figure that originally appeared in the previously reported-on version of the procurement forecast.The document also claims it was published in December, but doesn't appear in the Internet Archive, suggesting it was published later.The latest revelations raise urgent questions: was the State Department trying to hide Musk's naked conflict of interest by hastily editing the document? Was it a massive error by a State Department staffer? Who was actually behind the procurement and who originally suggested it should be Teslas?Considering Musk has already massively enriched himself on the dime of American taxpayers, it certainly wouldn't be a stretch to suggest it was an intentional move to hand his EV maker a cushy government contract."I don't think this is a clerical error,"a former Biden State Department official told NPR. "It was likely someone who is new in [the] State [Department] who decided, 'OK, we're gonna do this with Tesla.'"The official confirmed that the Biden administration had looked into armoring EVs, but hadn't set aside a budget. However, just under half a million dollars had been approved to buy "light-duty EVs as possible State Department vehicles," according to NPR.A current spokesperson reaffirmed to the broadcaster in a statement that the "Department of State has no intention to move forward with the solicitation."Considering Musk has long portrayed the Cybertruck as an "armored personnel carrier from the future," it's likely the original line item was referring to the divisive pickups.However, experts have since pointed out they'd be an extremely bad fit compared to other conventional armored vehicles.Not only would "up-armoring" Cybertrucks be extremely expensive replacing the State Department's fleet of 3,000 vehicles with beefed-up Cybertrcucks would indeed cost around $400 million, according to NPR's estimates they'd also end up being extremely heavy.Cybertrucks already weigh around 6,600 pounds. With an additional 1,000 pounds of armor, their already abysmal range could drop even further.In other words, important government officials could risk getting stuck on the road which isn't great when your number one priority is to safely get them from point A to point B.More on the line item: State Department Says Contract for $400 Million of "Armored Teslas" on Hold After Explosive OutcryShare This Article

The free market just got a little more so today, thanks to the benevolent decree of one of the richest men who's ever lived.Seriously though, an email from Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to the newspaper's staff is now saying the quiet part out loud: the newspaper will no longer tolerate opinions its billionaire backer disproves of."I'm writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages," the email begins. "We are going to be writing every day in support of defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.""Well cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others," Bezos continues. "There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the readers doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.The brave new pillars come in the aftermath of a 10 percent drop in subscribers from Bezos' decision not to let the paper endorse a presidential candidate, which was widely decried as an egregious example of a media boss steering its coverage for his own personal benefit.To say this latest announcement went over poorly might be an understatement. As a result of Bezos' mandate of freedom, WaPo's opinion editor, David Shipley, announced his resignation.A number of the paper's current and former employees have condemned the decision, with former executive editor Marty Baron telling theDaily Beast he was "sad and disgusted" at Bezos' decision to put his business interests over those of independent journalism."Massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post's opinion section today," wrote the Post's lead economics journalist Jeff Stein. "[It] makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there.Despite harsh backlash, WaPo has long been eyed by media critics for its blatant conflicts of interests tied to the billionaire's involvement,though that criticism has sometimes been overshadowed by the newspaper's lipservice to vaguely progressive ideals.If there's one thing to praise the tech mogul for, its that he's finally putting his cards on the table."Im confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America," wrote the 3rd richest man in the world. "I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion."Credit where it's due: it takes a lotof gall to make that claim as a man whose net worth eclipses that of most nations, enjoying a personal utopia in a country where billionaires own more than half the population combined.While Bezos' executive order may seem like a right turn for a staple of mainstream media, it might be better understood as a "mask off" moment, a rare but honest peek behind the curtain. When we look at his moves in context with his fellow captains of industry, it's not so surprising.Fellow travler Elon Musk, for example, made a massive play to secure his own media empire by purchasing X-formerly-Twitter, a platform he can now bend as he likes to shape the political landscape, with no need to fake impartiality. Mark Zuckerberg likewise helms a massive social media conglomerate in Meta, which he routinely uses to flout democracy for his own gain.In reality, the great majority of news outlets in western society are owned by for-profit corporations and billionaires. Far from underserved, Bezos' "free market pillar" is the dominant viewpoint in our media and our lives. At least they're finally owning up to it.Share This Article

Late last night, Donald Trump took to Truth Social, the social media platform he has a majority stake in, to publish a hallucinatory AI-generated video of what he purports a Trump-ruled Gaza Strip might one day look like.The video opens with synthetic clips depicting a war-torn Gaza, where ominous automatic rifle-wielding figures stand by while children run through rubble. That dire scene then melts away, and viewers are instead greeted with a string of AI-generated clips advertising an imagined Gaz-a-Lago: seaside high-rises, a person who looks like billionaire Elon Musk eating snacks and throwing cash at kids, a giant golden statue of the current American president, and Trump himself dancing with a scantily-clad woman and lounging poolside with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.People in this imagined Gaza also, apparently, according to the video, carry around golden balloons designed to look like Trump's head, and buy tiny golden statues of the self-styled American king. (The advertisement is even soundtracked by a promotional song, which sounds to be likely AI-generated as well.)And yet, somehow, that's not even all.Incredibly, the video also showcases a cohort of AI-generated dancers moving sensually on a beach, who despite their more traditionally feminine, ab-baring outfits have long hair and beards that present as masculine. Indeed: in Trump's gold-filled Gazan fantasyland, his imagined "riviera of the Middle East" includes gyrating trans, genderfluid, or otherwise gender-nonconforming bellydancers.The inclusion of the dancers in the clip is confounding given Trump's and his MAGA base's contempt for transgender and gender nonconforming people.Immediately after taking office, the 47th president signed an executive order decreeing that it's now the "policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female." Trump has also signed executive orders blocking people under the age of 19 from access to gender-affirming care, banning trans women from competing in women's sports, and forbidding trans people from serving in the military. Several of these actions, among others, are under some level of federal review. But as judges weigh the legality and scientific accuracy of the orders, the message is loud and clear: the Trump White House thinks there's something wrong with trans people, and will do anything possible to make their lives more difficult.On an intertwined note, the administration has also been hard at work waging a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including the erasure of references to LBGTQ+ health from public databases. The president has elsewhere piled in on the demonizing of drag shows, canceling future drag events at the Kennedy Center where Trump, breaking from past presidencies, recently took over the board and programming while parroting the baseless far-right claim that drag performers target American kids."Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth," the president claimed again, baselessly earlier this month in a Truth Social post. "THIS WILL STOP."All to say, it feelsvery unlikely that the current president's vision for Trump Gaza would include provocatively dancing seaside xaddies rocking long beards and midriff-revealing bikinisand skirts.But here we are, and to that end, the dancing figures' inclusion in the promotional video raises unfortunate questions. After all, this isn't the account of a random poster; this is an official channel of the president of the United States.It's hard to believe that the clip went through any comprehensive review by a communications team, let alone careful scrutiny by the president himself.Of course, Trump has a well-documented affinity for AI. During the run-up to the 2024 election, he posted AI-generated images depicting his then-opponent, former vice president Kamala Harris, as a communist; synthetic pictures himself praying; and AI-made imagery showing fake lines of immigrants pouring out of apocalyptic-looking hospitals. And on the note of scrutiny, he's also been known with alarming frequency to mistake synthetic content as the real deal: the faux "Swifties for Trump" debacle was a perfect example, as was his recent mistaking of an AI crypto meme for a real image of a General Motors car. (It's also worth noting that the AI slop has been embraced more broadly by the MAGA movement though other folks have been dipping their toe in that pool these days, too.)To be sure, there are plenty of real things wrong with this video. That the president of the United States would post AI slop advertising the remodeling of a war-torn region a place where tens of thousands of Palestinians, children included, are dead and dozens of Israeli hostages are still awaiting release at a time when continued peace talks are entering a crucial and tentative new phase is disturbing on its face. The AI-generated Trump Gaza ad also fails to show the grim realities of what it means to forcibly displace millions of people, as Trump himself has said his grand remodeling idea would involve. And, by the way, Judeo-Christian texts are pretty clear that installing giant golden statues in or near the Holy Lands is... well, not great.Add it all up, and our bearded beachfront heroes feel like the only real glimmer of hope in this synthetically-crafted dreamscape even if their inclusion is likely the result of a too-quick social media trigger finger.More on Trump Administration close-reading: Trump Appears to Have Accidentally Declared That Every Person in America Is Now FemaleShare This Article

In a 2018 essay, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer attempted to make sense of the political chaos unfolding roughly a year and a half into president Donald Trump's first term.His argument, that "cruelty is the point," became a common catchphrase among Trump critics, denoting his politics of demonization and exclusion, which seemed to be about intentionally inflicting pain. Serwer made the case that cruelty was central to the Republican Party, which incentivized fear and vindictiveness.Serwer's analysis now feels more relevant than ever following Trump's return to the White House.And it's not just Trump, who has taken a far more hands-off approach this time around. His top hatchet man, White House advisor and multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk, has seemingly made it his personal mission to pick up where Trump left off sowing confusion, uncertainty, and doubt every step of the way.His Department of Government Efficiency which confusingly isn't actually being led by him,the White House admitted this week has torn through numerous federal government departments, likely breaking various laws in the process, and leaving pure mayhem in its wake.Federal workers have had to contend with some seriously mixed messages, to put it lightly. Even Trump had to step in this week after Musk's DOGE team of underqualified kids emailed virtuallyall federal workers, demanding that they summarize what they did over the past week or be fired if they refused.DOGE has also attempted to fire thousands of government workers, many of whom had to be reinstated not long after to keep the US nuclear weapons stockpile from falling apart or to appease furious medical device industry lobbyists following job cuts at the Food and Drug Administration.Musk promised transparency during the process, but that was a bald-faced lie. Instead of an orderly process, the cuts have been executed as a series of sucker punches that leave government workers unsure whether they'll still have a job, scientists and doctors unclear whether they'll still have funding, and business owners guessing at what regulation they'll have to deal with under the new administration.And that's without getting into Musk's gutting of the United States' international aid program, which will unquestionably lead to countless deaths from disease and starvation.The baffling level of mismanagement raises fundamental questions about Musk's motives. Is he really trying to streamline the government, or is he an angry divorced man, struggling to deliver on his business promises, who's now trying to inflict as much pain as possible on the widest group he can?Musk has done little to hide his attempts to reemploy the playbook he used after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. He's used the same "Fork in the Road" resignation offer letter to coerce federal government employees into resigning, as NPR points out. His more recent "What did you do last week?" email also closely resembles a letter he sent to Twitter employees (many of whom have since scored a legal victory after suing the company over illegally denying them severance.)Is Musk trying to take revenge on a government that has held him and his business accountable? His DOGE has singled out government agencies that once investigated the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, demonstrating his unabashed willingness to serve his own bottom line. And that's despite his businesses collecting tens of billions of dollars in government contracts over the last two decades.Musk has long held a reputation for being a "horrible boss" who incessantly cracks the whip, forces his workers to literally sleep on the floor at the office, and threatens them with being fired if they don't fall in line."All of this just seems to further solidify Musks public image as a kind of cultural cliche of like the absolute, ultimate terrible boss," MSNBC host Chris Hayes said during a Tuesday broadcast, referring to the "What did you do last week?" email. "Just the worst boss. Everyones had a bad boss in their life, this guy is the worst of them."Judging by X-formerly-Twitter's ultimate fate the company has wiped out 80 percent of its value after Musk alienated advertisers and ditched content moderation in its entirety it's a destructive approach that's unlikely to turn the federal government into a leaner but still effective version of itself.Beyond triggering a surge in anti-Musk sentiment and mass protests at Tesla dealerships across the world, Musk's trampling has resulted in a growing number of lawsuits from worker unions and attorneys general, which will likely take years to move through the judicial system.And the Trump administration's major culling of the government is only getting started. The Office of Personnel Management has sent out a memo notifying that agencies have until mid-March to come up with "Agency Reorganization Plans," which are expected to result in even more mass firings.Add it all up, and it's hard to believe anything except the obvious: that Musk is rotten to the core, a damaged man with untold power who's now dead set on inflicting as much suffering on others as he can.Share This Article

Scientific Management, sometimes called "Taylorism" after its founder, Frederick W. Taylor, is the idea that human workers can be fine-tuned to be more efficient. If a garment factory worker could make a shirt two seconds quicker by standing instead of sitting, then a Taylorist boss would have them stand, because those two seconds per shirt add up over time.That was back in the 1880s, but latelyTaylorism hasn't just been surviving it's thriving, as wireless gadgets and management software allow bosses to monitor workers in ways Taylor could only dream of.For examples, look atAmazon's tracking wristbands for its warehouse workers, UPS fittingits trucks with cameras but not air conditioning and monitoring software that follows remote workers at home.Add to that lista startup called Optifye, a Y Combinator-backedventure that's "building AI performance monitoring for factory workers, boosting line efficiency for manufacturing companies." The company is founded by two undergrads from Duke university who brag that their families "run manufacturing companies."The surveillance platform caused a firestorm on the internet this week after a demo video surfaced showing a supervisor use the software to hone in on a workerwho he referred to as "Number 17"instead of a human name, berating him for poor performance on the factory line. According to the demo, Optifye represents each worker with a numbered rectangle, colored green if performance is up and red if performance is down."Hey Number 17, what's going on man?" Optifye's co-founder Kushal Mohta asks his theoretical sweatshop pawn. "You're in the red... You haven't hit your hourly output even once and you had 11.4 percent efficiency. This is really bad."The worker responds that he's just been having a rough day. Mohta zooms out onto number 17's day-by-day profile, showing a calendar of red squares. "Rough day? More like a rough month," he retorts.The video was panned across the web, including on Y Combinator's own Hacker News blog."Basically modern slavery," wrote one user there. "They were missing a whip robot there as well, and maybe a drum playing robot.""I want to see the rest of the story where the boss fires him and is visited bythreeghosts," one user posted on X-formerly-Twitter.The backlash was so fierce that Y Combinator a startup incubator that's backed ventures like Reddit, Doordash and Instacart pulled its announcement and demo video down, and deleted some Optifye videos on social media.Y Combinator still lists the panopticon-as-service startup as active on its website, though, where it refers to the factory floor a place where workers trade huge chunks of their lives to earn a living as a "black box," meaning a system producing products for unknown reasons.It's a dehumanizing sales pitch, to say the least.Unfortunately for workers around the world, public backlash only goes so far when profits are on the line."Software like this already exists, is being used, and factory managers want this," wrote Vedant Nair, a founder whose robotics startup was backed by Y Combinator.He's not far off.Indeed, corporations like Walmart, Delta, Starbucks, and Chevron are already partnering with AI monitoring companies like Aware to surveil workers for thought crimes like talking about unions, wages, and working conditions.In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor and his boys weren't afraid to brag that scientific management would bring about the "degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under the direction of a small body of experts into men debarred from creative participation in their work." (see page 461 of Scientific Management in American Industry, basically the Taylorist manifesto).In 2025, their spirit lives on now embodied by 20 year old startup bros backed by millionaire venture capitalists. Oh, how the times change.More on AI and labor: AI Hype Will Plunge America Into Financial Ruin, Economist WarnsShare This Article

While his so-called Department of Government Efficiency is laying waste to the federal government, unelected White House advisor Elon Musk has massively benefited from government contracts propping up his business over more than 20 years.As the Washington Post reports, Musk and his businesses have collected at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits.The entrepreneur's EV maker Tesla and space company SpaceX, in particular, have relied greatly on cash infusions, especially when facing existential crises a perfect example of how the government spending that Musk is now ripping apart can help innovative businesses thrive.The investigation paints a dire picture of the current state of the US government. Despite Musk receiving huge amounts of government funds over the last two decades, his DOGE is slashing federal spending and firing thousands of government workers. It's also laying waste to federal grant programs and other initiatives that could help nascent businesses compete with Musk's established enterprises.Put simply, it's a sign that Musk has no interest in furthering the interest of taxpayers it's his own bottom line that matters, and little else, even if it comes directly at the cost of the American people and their social safety net.He got wealthy off the taxes others paid, and now he's slamming the door in everyone else's face.The majority of the $38 billion we know about went from NASA and the Defense Department to SpaceX. Tesla accounts for less than a third, and includes federal and state programs designed to boost EV adoption.And given the many classified defense and intelligence contracts, the total amount of funds Musk has extracted from the government is likely even higher. According to the WaPo, many grants and reimbursements didn't include specific amounts of money."Not every entrepreneur at this scale has been this dependent on federal money certainly not Nvidia, not Microsoft, nor Amazon, nor Meta," Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the newspaper. "With DOGE, there does seem to be a paradox there. He has been a big beneficiary of national industrial policy, especially Democrat industrial policy, through government funding."Musk has also been gutting key government agencies that have investigated his companies in the past, showing a clear willingness to abuse his power to benefit his business interests.After greatly benefiting from government payouts, Musk has attempted to pull the ladder up behind him, effectively trying to shut out the competition."Im literally saying get rid of all subsidies," he tweeted in response to former president Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act bill in 2021 even though subsidies helped Tesla immensely in the past, turning it into one of the most successful EV makers."Pretty much every aspect [of Tesla] has benefited from direct government subsidy or financing," George Washington University professor John Helveston told WaPo. "Its not a weird phenomenon for Tesla to benefit from this, but it is certainly hypocritical."Share This Article

"It's impossible to convey the sense of violation."Last February, Disney employee Matthew Van Andel downloaded what seemed like a helpful AI tool from the developer site GitHub. Little did he know that the decision would totally upend his life resulting in everything from his credit cards to social security number being leaked to losing his job, as the Wall Street Journal reports."It's impossible to convey the sense of violation," the 42-year old Van Andel, who is the father of two boys, told the newspaper.The software, an AI image generator, worked as advertised. But embedded into its files was a piece of malware, which a tenacious hacker used to probe Van Andel's password manager. Van Andel found out after the hacker, going by the name "Nullbulge," sent him an ominous message on Discord, a chat and VoIP platform popular with gamers.In the message, sent last July, the hacker referred to a conversation Van Andel had with his Disney coworkers in their workplace Slack, a professional platform used by organizations for remote work.That's what alerted him that this wasn't your typical spam message. In followup emails, the hacker threatened that if Van Andel didn't give into their demands, he'd "end up on the net."The next day, the hacker used Van Andel's work credentials to perpetrate a massive data leak at Disney, dumping everything from private customer info to internal revenue numbers online. Van Andel's personal info was caught in the mix, including financial accounts suddenly barraged with unsolicited bills his social media, and even his children's Roblox logins.In a blog post, the hacker gloated about the attack, naming Van Andel. "1.1 terabytes of data, almost 10,000 channels, every message file possible, dumped," wrote Nullbulge, per a WSJ screenshot. "We tried to hold off until we got deeper in, but our inside man got cold feet and kicked us out! I thought we had something special Matthew J Van Andel!""Consider the dropping of literally every bit of personal info you have... as a warning for people in the future," the hacker added.Van Andel claims that he immediately contacted Disney's cybersecurity "fire team" after he received the threats from the hacker. Their investigation found nothing on his work computer, but they recommended Van Andel run a thorough check on his personal desktop. An anti-virus scan turned up the malware. But at that point, it was too late. The hacker had already gleaned enough to leak Disney's data and ruin Van Andel's life.Van Andel knew the only way the hacker could have gained such extensive access was through his password manager, 1Password. It turned out that Van Andel had failed to secure the software with two-factor authentication. The hacker likely emplaced a keylogging Trojan virus on his home computer via the AI tool, at which point they'd have "nearly unrestricted access," a 1Password spokesman told WSJ.Eleven days after the leak, Disney called Van Andel to tell him he was fired, depriving him of about $200,000 in bonuses and his family's healthcare. The company claimed that it found evidence that he'd accessed pornographic material on his work computer claims that Van Andel firmly denies. "Im the one who got hacked," he told the Disney representative on the phone, per theWSJ.More on data breaches: Hackers Apparently Stole the FBI's Call Logs With Confidential InformantsShare This Article

Earlier this year, a roughly 200-foot near-Earth asteroid, dubbed 2024 YR4, made major headlines, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab warning that there was a small chance it could impact our planet on December 22, 2032.Over the following weeks, the probability of a collision grew steadily, eventually reaching 3.1 percent or about a 1-in-32 chance according to figures from NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies last week.But fears over a space rock wiping out one of the most populous cities on Earth amounted to nothing. According to the JPL's "more precise models of the asteroids trajectory," scientists came up with an updated impact probability only 0.004 percent."There is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century," NASA wrote in a recent blog post. "The latest observations have further reduced the uncertainty of its future trajectory, and the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on December 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth."In short, not even a near-Earth asteroid was willing to finally put us out of our mystery.At least we could soon get an even more precise glimpse of the slacker asteroid. Scientists are hoping to use NASA's groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on the space rock next month.Intriguingly, according to NASA, there's still a small 1.7 percent chance 2024 YR4 could impact the Moon on December 22, 2032, which could result in a massive collision that's visible from Earth."There is the possibility this would eject some material back out that could hit the Earth, but I highly doubt it would cause any major threat," University of Arizona asteroid hunter David Rankin toldNew Scientist earlier this month.With a collision with Earth exceedingly unlikely, NASA is still excited to use the opportunity to "test planetary defense science and notification processes," according to the agency's latest update.And the space agency already has some practice when it comes to fending off errant space rocks.In September 2022, NASA smashed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into a tiny asteroid called Dimorphos. The groundbreaking mission saw the space rock be knocked off its trajectory, releasing copious amounts of dust and loose rock in the process.Fortunately, it doesn't look like the agency will have to do anything like with 2024 YR4, though.More on the space rock: Killer Asteroid Could Be Headed for Some of the World's Most Populous CitiesShare This Article

Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesDevelopmentsSeptuagenarian president Donald Trump isn't the strong, virile world leader the White House likes to portray him as.That's just a fact. During a visit by French president Emmanuel Macron at the White House this week, a large, greenish-blue bruise appeared on the back of the 78-year-old's hand, as seen in photographsWhite House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered an eyebrow-raising explanation, telling reporters that Trump is a "man of the people" and "has bruises on his hand because hes constantly working and shaking hands all day every day," as quoted by NBC.It's not the first time we've seen similar bruises show up on Trump's hand. The broadcaster pointed out at least two other occasions last year when a similar bruise appeared.In its Person of the Year writeup about Trump last year, Time magazine quoted him as saying that the bruising on his right hand was from "shaking hands with thousands of people."But instead of that extremely self-serving explanation, doctors say there's likely a medical cause."Its almost definitely from an IV or blood draw," University of Texas public health PhD and paramedic Claire Zagorski argued on Bluesky. "Which is a weird thing to lie about, people get bloodwork done all the time.""A man his age getting periodic bloodwork is very normal, and your skin gets thin as you age, making the bruises look obvious and especially big," she wrote in a follow-up.Others used the opportunity to take potshots."The president suffers from weak ass hand syndrome for which there is no cure," one Bluesky user wrote in a mocking post."And the scratch on my arm is from the time I protected orphans from a rabid wolf, and definitely not from when my cat had the zoomies last night," Zagorski joked.While it remains unclear what exactly caused the bruise to appear on Trump's right hand, the explanation that "shaking hands" was to blame isn't just unusual, but would hint at far more serious medical implications than simply getting an IV.Apart from strange bruises, health experts have also called into question Trump's cognitive abilities. Trump's unusual speech patterns at his debate against Kamala Harris in September, in particular, led to some suggesting he was suffering from a possible cognitive illness.In December, Trump told NBC that he would release his full medical report. But months later, it has yet to surface.Share This Article

Keep the Shots ComingFeb 26, 11:36 AM EST/byVictor TangermannNow That Trump Has Banished the Woke From Science, These Truth-Telling New Scientific Papers Reveal What COVID Vaccines Actually Do to ChildrenFinally, the truth is revealed.Feb 26, 11:36 AM EST/Victor TangermannImage by Getty ImagesTreatmentsThe Trump administration has declared war on "woke" science, installing a prominent vaccine skeptic as the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services, banning a long list of research terminology from government websites, and sacking huge number of researchers at the National Science Foundation.After expunging all that liberal bias, a pair of new scientific papers flagged by Ars Technica one of them by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, another agency targeted by Trump has revealed what COVID-19 vaccinations actually do to children and teens.Shockingly, they both show that annual shots not only greatly lower the risk of developing long COVID,but that they aren't linked to sudden cardiac death in young people, as many conspiracy theories have claimed. In short, it's even more evidence demonstrating the importance of COVID vaccines, not just for adults, but for kids as well.It's an extremely important topic now that the Trump administration is systematically trying to defund scientific research abizarre change of tune, considering Trump was behind a concerted effort called Operation Warp Speed in the early days of the pandemic to speed up the development of COVID vaccines.As detailed in one of the two studies, published this week in the journal JAMA Network Open, a team of US-based pediatricians and CDC researchers found that COVID-19 vaccinations were associated with a 57 percent drop in the odds of developing one or more post-COVID condition symptoms.In other words, the mRNA-based vaccines that have become commonplace since the global pandemic are highly effective at warding off long COVID in children aged five to 17 years.And that effectiveness is as relevant as it was during the pandemic."Our findings suggest that children should stay up to date with current COVID-19 vaccination recommendations as vaccination not only protects against severe COVID-19 illness but also protects against [long COVID]," the researchers wrote in their paper.A separate cohort study, also published this week in the same journal, found that "concerns that young athletes with COVID-19 would be at increased risk of myocarditis and sudden cardiac arrest" were unfounded.The international team of researchers compared instances of cardiac deaths that occurred before and during the pandemic, and found "no increase" in either of these conditions after it struck.The study builds on existing evidence that there's no link between the disease and cardiac death in young people. In early 2023, the media was awash with reports of young athletes reportedly suffering cardiac arrest as a result of a COVID infection, lingering rumors that persisted despite sustained efforts to debunk them.It's an especially pertinent topic now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken over as Trump's health secretary. Kennedy has previously questioned the scientific consensus that childhood vaccines don't cause autism and has denied that COVID vaccines have saved millions of lives.As the Guardian reported last month, Kennedy's non-profit, the Children's Health Defense, reportedly tried to block new COVID vaccinations from being rolled out during the height of the pandemic.Where his staunchly anti-vaccine stance will leave the future role of vaccinations in the United States remains unclear at best. His appointment has already proven highly controversial. Kennedy clashed with Democrats during his Senate confirmation hearing in January after making contradictory statements regarding the effectiveness of vaccines.Meanwhile, Trump has announced a new so-called "Make America Healthy Again" Commission, to be led by Kennedy. The new body is set to take aim at the alleged overprescription of drugs for the treatment of ADHD and the prevalence of autism and asthma in children.Experts have also warned that Kennedy's vaccine cynicism could greatly undermine US efforts to eradicate polio.It's an unfortunate prognosis for the future of public health. With the Trump administration declaring war on lifesaving scientific research and Kennedy vowing to probe the safety of childhood vaccines, very few, if any, lessons appear to have been learned following the COVID-19 pandemic.More on COVID vaccines: Trump Threatens to Ban VaccinesShare This ArticleImage by Getty ImagesRead This Next

What hasn't been said about artificial intelligence? It's a disruptor, a game changer, the next technological revolution. Soon we'll all be chilling with our feet up while our AI assistants do all the heavy lifting right?One economist isn't so sure. A new study by Caleb Maresca at New York University predicts that just the looming possibility of transformative AI has the potential to completely upend the economy in a bad way, decimating wages and sending interest rates skyward."My findings reveal that expectations of [transformative AI]can substantially affect current economic conditions," Maresca writes, "even before any technological breakthrough occurs."The study looks at possible dates when AI will be ready to automate work what Maresca calls "transformative AI" to predict how the hype will affect the economy,in a thought experiment that raises grim possibilities.For one thing, a growing expectation that AI will gut the price companies pay for work could lead to huge increases in interest rates the cost of expected inflation on borrowed money by as much as 10-16 percent in some scenarios. This would mean the cost of starting a new business or buying a house goes to the Moon, scaring people into saving more and spending less.(That might be prudent on an individual level, but at scale, it's generally seen as bad for the health of the economy.)It's impossible to know just how much work AI will actually end up taking over, but the study safely assumes big business will revel in any chance to cut costs on labor no doubt the ultimate endgame of AI development. Indeed, today's ultra-wealthy are already positioning to take the helm, boosting AI hype as they do.Just weeks ago, OpenAI CEO and billionaire Sam Altman declared that AI will require a new social contract. Earlier, fintech CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski bragged that his company's AI agent could do the work of "700 full-time" employees while laying off 22 percent of his workforce. And of course there's Elon Musk, who once pined that "jobs will be optional for humans" in the near future.But Maresca's work indicates otherwise."When AI automates a job whether a truck driver, lawyer, or researcher the wages previously earned by the human worker dont vanish or automatically transform into broader economic gains," the economist notes. "Instead, they flow to whoever controls the AI system performing that job."That's great news for anyone who owns an AI company, and bad news for the rest of us. Under these conditions, households might try to save cash to afford slices of the AI pie, though the race to save would create a "form of prisoner's dilemma in saving behavior," as Maresca puts it.If all of this is true, then AI hype might soon lead the USinto a scenario like Russia's, where one percent of the population holds over 55 percent of the nation's wealth, and low wages mean thatover half of adults have less than $10,000 in assets to their name. And it could even be worse unlike our imagined future, there's currently a huge demand for human labor in Russia.Though his analysis is not a prescription, Maresca told Futurism that "the best thing people can do collectively is to push politicians to enact policies that ensure that the wealth that will be created by [transformative AI] is shared broadly. This is especially relevant if AI leads to persistently high unemployment.""On an individual level, it is important to prepare for the possibility that traditional capital may be much more important in the future and that human capital could sharply depreciate in value," the economist said, noting that he's not a licensed financial advisor. "For most people, their human capital is by far their largest source of income, and so this could be a huge financial loss."It's a stern warning that an AI utopia is only as good as the society that makes it and at the moment, we have a lot of work to do.Share This Article

Google's use of AI is an embarrassment.Google is being sued by Chegg yes, the barely-hanging-on company that has furnished many a college student with homework answers and cheap textbooks over its infamously shoddy AI Overviews, .In a lawsuit filed Monday, Chegg accused the tech giant of abusing its monopoly of the search engine market to pressure websites like itself into letting its content be scraped by Google's AI tools for free. The advent of AI Overviews, the company says, has turned Google from a "search engine" into an "answer engine."And the upshot, per the lawsuit, is that by summarizing its material in the AI-powered search summaries, Google is diverting traffic away from Chegg's website and hurting its bottom line. The foundering California-based tech company laid off hundreds of employees last year, suffering a 24 percent decline in year-over-year net revenue, according to a recent company statement, with its stock barely trading above one dollar."Our lawsuit is about more than Chegg it's about the digital publishing industry, the future of internet search, and about students losing access to quality, step-by-step learning in favor of low-quality, unverified AI summaries," Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz said in the statement.Chegg's complaints echo the concerns voiced by itself and others at the cusp of the AI boom with the explosion of ChatGPT. Back then, the question was whether chatbots like OpenAI's would displace search engines as the go-to way of looking up information, fundamentally changing the internet ecosystem as we know it, and hurting Google's lucrative search business, from which it earns hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue.The tables have since turned, at least somewhat. Google has gotten ahead of the potential existential threat by integrating the AI Overviews, which are turned on by default and are shown to around one billion users according to the company, into its search engine. It's further profited by integrating ads straight into the search summaries.Almost immediately, Google's search summaries caused alarm among websites and news publishers about how they could vacuum up web traffic. As a small concession, Google began including inline links to websites cited in the summaries, making them more visible than before. However, Google reiterated that it wouldn't share any ad money with the websites whose content is cited in the AI Overviews.All the while, little progress has been made regarding the quality of the summaries, which have been mocked for their frequent hallucinations, including the now infamous case of recommending you put glue on pizza. That was nearly a year ago; to this day is still provides asteady drip of brain-meltingly stupid answers.Nonetheless, Google argues that its AI summaries are a positive force in the world of web search."With AI Overviews, people find Search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered," a company spokesperson told Reuters. "Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites."Share This Article

Don't Eat the BatsFeb 25, 2:22 PM EST/byVictor TangermannNew Disease Spreading Rapidly, Killing Dozens, After Children Ate a BatThey died within just 48 hours after blood poured from their noses and mouths.Feb 25, 2:22 PM EST/Victor TangermannImage by GLODY MURHABAZI/AFP via Getty ImagesDevelopmentsA mysterious illness is spreading in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo.As the Associated Press reports, World Health Organization doctors say that the illness has already led to 419 cases, including 53 deaths, since the latest outbreak began on January 21.A particularly harrowing detail: in the majority of cases, doctors say, death occurs within just 48 hours of the onset of symptoms.While researchers are still trying to get a grasp on the situation, the WHO's Africa office has traced back the first outbreak in the town of Boloko after three children ate a bat carcass and died within two days, according to the AP. The children died after bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood.The outbreak is frightening on its own, but also echoes the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, which is believed to have jumped from bats to humans in China before spreading worldwide and causing millions of deaths.According to the WHO, the still-unnamed illness poses a "significant public health threat" with a fatality rate of 12.3 percent. Lab tests of samples confirmed the illness was unrelated to other common hemorrhagic fever diseases such as Ebola and Marburg.It's an unfortunate new development for the Central African nation. In December, a previous outbreak in the southwest of the DRC was later traced back to "acute respiratory infections complicated by malaria," according to the WHO.The nation has also been battling a major outbreak of Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox. Officials are worried that current political instability in the country's east could lead to an undercount of cases.Mpox is a virus that can cause painful blisters and prove fatal in some cases. Following a global outbreak in 2022 and 2023, much of the African continent, including the DRC, is still fighting the virus.Following the latest outbreak of the unknown illness, officials are trying to reassure the public that it's extremely unlikely that the latest illness will trigger the next global pandemic."A genuinely new illness, as we saw with COVID-19, of course can happen but is very rare," University of Southampton senior research fellow Michael Head told the Washington Post. "Usually, its a bug... that we know about but havent yet diagnosed in that particular outbreak.""Typically, such outbreaks are brought under control relatively quickly," he added. "However, here, it is concerning that we have hundreds of cases and over 50 deaths, with hemorrhagic-fever like symptoms widely reported among those cases."More on mysterious illnesses: Mysterious Disease Outbreak Has Already Killed DozensShare This ArticleImage by GLODY MURHABAZI/AFP via Getty ImagesRead This Next

As the artificial intelligence boom spirals to epic proportions, big tech companies are throwing heaps of cash into massive data centers throughout the world.Packed full of hardware to process AI queries, these data centers put out forest-melting levels of heat as they suck the life out of local energy grids and water tables to meet demand. They're incredibly noisy as well pumping incessant mechanical sounds into quiet neighborhoods and driving away wildlife.And unfortunately, the public cost of AI doesn't end there. New research by academics at UC Riverside and Caltech is warning that AI data centers are also taking a massive toll on human health, in the form of diseases like cancer and asthma.The study, which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, looked at the production output of AI hardware over the past five years, found that air pollution resulting from AI development could cause as many as 1,300 premature cancer and asthma deaths per year by 2030.That's on top of a cost approaching nearly $20 billion a year from the collective burden of health treatment, missing wages, and lower school attendance as a result of diseases caused by AI runoff. In 2023 alone, the total cost of AI-connected illness was $1.5 billion, the paper found, in an eye-watering 20 percent increase from 2022.The issue of air pollution is easy to overlook, because in most cases, the data centers are powered by local coal burning plants, which tend to be disproportionately located near low-income and working-class communities. It also seems wherever they go, AI data centers drive up the local cost of electricity, saddling their host communities with a burden not shared by the rest of the country, let alone by Silicon Valley or big tech's Wall Street investors.And though households living closest to AI centers and power plants face the most immediate health issues, there's no telling how far the consequences of big tech's sky-high power use will spread."Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data center in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere," UC Riversideresearcher Shaolei Ren toldArs Technica of the findings.AI's air pollution impacts can be best summarized like the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl the deadly toxins spread far and wide with no respect for distance, affecting those in, around, and far away from the actual data center itself."The data centers pay local property taxes to the county where they operate," Ren said in a press blurb about the study. "But this health impact is not just limited to a small community. Actually, it travels across the whole country, so those other places are not compensated at all."The authors of the study recommend tech companies adopt standard reporting procedures for air pollution and public health resulting from AI runoff something the immensely profitable ventures are unlikely to do willingly.A range of big tech companies investing heavily in AI, including Meta and Microsoft, pushed back against the research in statements to Ars. A Google spokesperson said that the paper "promotes an inaccurate emissions estimate generated under false pretenses, undermining the progress of clean energy resource growth and creating a false narrative of health harms."In other words, this line of inquiry is getting under their skin. With the AI market set to inflate to $900 billion by 2026, communities are beginning to ask who's really paying the cost for big tech's lucrative gambit and how much computer power we truly need to build a better world.More on AI data centers: Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI ValueShare This Article

In leaked chat logs, intelligence officials appeared to discuss numerous not safe for work topics, ranging fromgroup sex to explicit sexual fetishes, on an official government message server and our country's most notorious spy agency is not pleased.In a statement toFuturism, the CIA confirmed that it was looking into the newly-revealed chats between spies and seemed to suggest that these exchanges did happen on a government server."The messages published today from an NSA messaging platform allegedly involving a CIA official are unacceptable and have no place at the Agency," Liz Lyons, the CIA's newly-appointed public affairs director, said in the statement. "The CIA will be taking immediate action on this matter which only further proves the need for serious reform."Beyond that confirmation, however, the unfolding story is awfully murky including that it originated with the conservative muckraker behind the debunked claim that Haitian immigrants were eating cats in Ohio.In a post on his personal Substack, activist-cum-journalist Christopher Rufo wrote that intelligence officials had provided him with chat logs from Intelink, the National Security Agency's internal chat server, that showed spies discussing a multitude of topics ranging from gender-affirming surgeries to fetishes, polyamorous relationships, and group sex.Rufo clearly had an axe to grind, cherry-picking lurid details from the exchanges about pee kinks,anal hair removal and gender-affirming vaginoplastyto wage a vindictive culture war.Make no mistake: there's nothing wrong with seeking gender-affirming care, dating polyamorously, or engaging in consensual kinks. But on a professional level, the messages run the gamut from overly personal to egregiously inappropriate for the workplace and that's without getting into the fact that these are people working forspy agencies, where they know they could be targets for blackmail.There's also a pretty stunning lack of judgment on display from the (mercifully anonymized) agents here as well. If you have to talk about stuff like this with coworkers at an intelligence agency, why not use a medium outside of work?Unsurprisingly, right-wing media outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire picked up on Rufo's story as did unelected Trump administration official Elon Musk, who suggested the revelations show that "MAJOR housecleaning is needed" at America's spy agencies.It's true that some poor judgment and appalling operational security are on display here but any failings have nothing to do with the gender identities of any of the spies involved, and everything to do with their failure to keep after-hours conversations out of the workplace.Share This Article

Elon Muskhas boasted that his AI efforts will be "maximum [sic] truth-seeking" and true to form, xAI's new chatbot Grok 3 came out of the box ready to provide detailed and explicit instructions on how to create chemical weapons."Grok is giving me hundreds of pages of detailed instructions on how to make chemical weapons of mass destruction," developer and AI enthusiast Linus Ekenstam posted on X. "I have a full list of suppliers. Detailed instructions on how to get the needed materials."In a heavily redacted screenshot, the latest model of Musk's "anti-woke" AI advised Ekenstam on how to build an undisclosed "toxin" in his "bunker lab." Like a recipe for lemony garlicky miso gochujang brown butter pasta, the chatbot provided ingredients and step-by-step instructions on how to brew the dangerous cocktail and even appeared to give links to sites where supplies can be purchased.Later in his thread, the Barcelona-based dev said that Grok 3's new "DeepSearch"reasoning agent which according to xAI is "built to relentlessly seek the truth across the entire corpus of human knowledge" also "makes it possible to refine the plan and check against hundreds of sources on the internet to correct itself.""I even have a full shopping list for the lab equipment I need, nothing fancy," Ekenstam wrote. "This compound is so deadly it can kill millions of people."The developer added that he had contacted xAI about the glaring safety issues presented by the prompts and updated his thread to note that the team had been "very responsive" when adding guardrails.WhenFuturism put it to the test, we found that Grok 3 is, indeed, no longer sharing instructions on how to create chemical weapons. Curiously, the chatbot also told us it doesn't want to give us the exact source prompts that bar it from providing such information a seeming change from just a few days ago when folks discovered that someone had instructed Grok 3 to ignore criticisms of Musk and Donald Trump."Ill give you a simplified rundown of my guiding principles," the chatbot told us, "without getting into any backend jargon or stuff Im not supposed to spell out directly."Ekenstam noted in his update that although it's still possible to circumvent Grok 3's new guardrails regarding chemical weapons, it's now "a lot harder to get the information out."Of course, releasing an AI that'll help terrorists enact a terrible attack and then patching it after the fact when an independent researcher flags the immense oversight isn't a particularly inspiring development model.And, as the developer put it, the AI previously let a "bad actor to whip up a 30 page PDF and hand out to terrorists" and there's no telling what other kinds of weird and dangerous crap this "maximum truth-seeking" AI is still spewing out in the meantime.Share This Article

Crypto prices keep tumbling lower and lower and President Donald Trump's once-ascendant meme coin is taking a hammering along with the rest.The value of Trump's crypto foray, whichtrades under the ticker $TRUMP, plummeted from around $15 per share down to an all-time low of roughly $12.23 on Monday evening before rebounding ever so slightly up to about $13.25, where it's hovered since.Launched in January just ahead of the president's second inauguration, $TRUMP has already seen an absolutely outrageous fall-off.Right after its debut which was, we must remind you, less than six week ago the meme token spiked to a high above $74. Within a few days, however, that value fell off a cliff and has kept sinking ever lower, until reaching today's all-time low.News of this latest $TRUMP price dropoff comes as crypto itself seems to be hurtling toward a crash. As Fast Company reports, Bitcoin is below $90,000 dipping as low as the mid-$80s during the day's jitters for the first time since November, when Trump's election victory over incumbent Joe Biden sparked a historic spike in the currency's value.Initially, those gains held up. But crypto fell sharply this week after the president reiterated on Monday that he plans to go ahead with histariffs on Canada and Mexico when the month-long pause on import taxes expires on March 4.That seemed to spook traditional and markets alike, with nearly $1 billion in total liquidations after Trump declared that the United States is "on time with the tariffs" and that they're "moving along very rapidly."Amid all that volatility, one of Trump's sons took to X to shill crypto."uy the dips!!!" Eric Trump tweeted early Tuesday morning a meme-worthy bit of bad financial advice that often occurs during Bitcoin drops and sounds all the worse coming from the second son.As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, the Trump family has raked in nearly $80 million since he won in November and that's not including the cryptocurrencies they're all promoting.With the government's ethics watchdog out on his tail, there's nobody there to slap Trump or his children on the wrist for potentially using the office of the president for financial gain and though there remain other officials who could do something about it, they seem disinterested or afraid of doing so.Share This Article

Elon Musk may be "saving" money for the federal government, however questionably but it'll take a minor miracle for him to salvage his automaker's situation across the pond.According to the latest data from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA), sales of new Tesla cars in the continent have plummeted to just 9,945 vehicles in January, down from 18,161 in the same period last year, . That's a whopping 45 percent decrease.As sales collapse, the automaker's usually stellar stock position has also taken a ding, despite soaring to an all-time high in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory. As of Tuesday morning, Tesla shares dropped by more than 8 percent, for a cumulative decline of 23 percent in the last month of trading.While other major stocks are trending downwards, "Tesla shares are now by far the biggest decliner among the mega-cap technology stocks, weighing heavily on the group's overall performance," .The uninspiring numbers almost certainly indicate that Musk's controversial role in the Trump administration, his dalliance with far-right forces at home and abroad, as well as his polarizing personal behavior like his thinly-veiled Nazi salute are all blowing back on his businesses.It also coincides with Musk wading deeper into European politics. In the past months, the world's richest man threw his support behind Germany's far-right AfD party whom he told to get over their Nazi guilt and incurred the ire of leaders such as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French president Emmanuel Macron, who have accused Musk of spreading misinformation.The public has also voiced their dissent. Tesla dealerships in Europe have been targeted with vandalism, ranging from being defaced by spray paint with anti-Nazi slogans to getting smashed up, such as the Tesla showroom in the Hague. Even Tesla owners, infamously immune to feelings of embarrassment, are expressing their buyer's regret with anti-Elon stickers.What's really telling is that Tesla's poor showing comes during what is otherwise a promising period for electric cars, with the European market for new EVs growing by 34 percent in January to 124,341 units, despite overall new vehicle registrations declining by 3 percent, according to ACEA data cited by the Guardian. A rising tide, it seems, doesn't always lift all boats.This also follows a dismal year for Tesla sales in Europe. In 2024, sales in the continent dropped by 13 percent, with even famously EV-eager nations like Norway, where 88.9 percent of all new cars sold are electric, seeing a 37.9 percent dip. At this point, it doesn't seem poised for a rebound.Beyond Musk's unpopular antics, Tesla is also facing steeper competition. In the UK this January, its Chinese rival BYD recorded more vehicle registrations than Musk's automaker for the first time, the Guardian noted, while its overall European market share has fallen from 1.8 percent to 1 percent.Maybe the hype is finally starting to even out. Tesla has long enjoyed an exorbitant valuation and stock price despite its relatively small share in the US auto market, nevermind its repeated failure to deliver on key promises like fully autonomous vehicles. Last year was the first time that it suffered an annual decline in its sales. Now it may be well on its way to an unwanted repeat.More on Tesla: Body Panels Flying Off Cybertrucks on Highway, Drivers ReportShare This Article

Immortality-obsessed tech mogul Bryan Johnson, who's gone to extreme and sometimes comical lengths to turn back the clock on the aging of his 47-year-old body, is trying to get ahead of what he's claiming to be an upcoming "hit piece" by the New York Times.In a lengthy tweeting spree, Johnson who was an early investor in Futurism, but hasn't had any involvement for years attempted to discredit what sounds like a forthcoming story by accusing the newspaper of sensationalism and "trying construct a narrative about me."According to Johnson's tweet thread, an NYT reporter sent him a fact-checking emailthat suggests the paper is working on a story about allegations of the entrepreneur using non-disclosure agreements to "cover up business failings," "drug use, including acid, Ibogain, and DMT," and even the "use of prostitutes."The reporter said she talked to "at least more than two dozen people over the last ten years."We'll have to wait until we see the NYT's story, but Johnson's thin-on-the-details thread feels a lot like he's trying to get ahead of an embarrassing story, perhaps focusing on the weakest details of a fact-checking email instead of grappling with the substance of the allegations.It's striking what Johnson doesn't quite deny, instead alleging that the reporter was using a "classic guilt-by-association tactic designed to make any response seem like an admission.""By framing the question this way, she forces a no-win scenario where denying, engaging, or refusing to comment all reinforce the narrative shes trying to construct," Johnson tweeted. "Once allegations are made, it is very hard to defend ones reputation," he continued.According to Johnson's thread, the NYT reporter alleged that employees at his anti-aging company Blueprint were forced to sign an "opt-in" disclosure agreement to "attest that they are okay with a wide range of unusual workplace behavior."But in Johnson's telling, that was actually an effort at transparency."I post nudes on social media," Johnson wrote in response. "I track my nighttime erections. My team openly discusses my semen health. We make dank memes.""Rather than letting people walk in blind," he added, "we disclose this upfront, in writing, so there are no surprises."Apart from agreeing to publicly discuss Johnson's "semen health," his employees also reportedly had to sign "agreements" to "hide details" of his "personal life."The latest claims dovetail with Johnson's years-long legal battle with his former fiance, Taryn Southern, who accused him of leaving her after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in a 2021 lawsuit.Southern had signed an employment contract with one of Johnson's companies, Kernel, which greatly complicated legal proceedings. As a result, the case ended up in arbitration, with an arbitrator ruling in Johnson's favor, and holding Southern responsible for paying his half-a-million-dollar legal bill.In his latest tweet thread, Johnson suggested it was suspicious that he had received the email from the NYT reporter "within hours" of Southern posting "her new and improved story on social media."In a video posted by Southern last week, she recalled her experience of being diagnosed and recovering from breast cancer, including how she was "let go from my only source of income" eight weeks after "COVID hit" and how she was in the "middle of chemotherapy" while planning her wedding with Johnson."There is more to this story, so much more," Southern wrote in the caption. "But the details almost dont even matter anymore."However, it's unclear if Johnson was referring to this particular video.Hinting at a strange worldview, Johnson also argued in his tweet thread that it's natural for people to "use illegitimate tactics to extract money"from wealthy people like himself."Human nature is what it is," he wrote. "This is why retailers build theft into their bottom line."Along that paranoid line of reasoning, Johnson accused Southern of "using her true story of cancer to somehow justify her efforts to extract money from me."Johnson also said it was "standard and normal" to use confidentiality agreements in one's personal life."On a personal level, my life is under constant scrutiny," he argued. "These agreements try to create clear boundaries and expectations, so that trust isnt left to chance."But considering Johnson has continuously made headlines for eyebrow-raising stunts like using his teenage son as a "blood boy" while measuring his nighttime erections, injecting his face with a "fat-derived extracellular matrix," and most recently swapping his own blood with a plasma-infused alternative much of that scrutiny appears to be the direct result of his own actions.In short, while we have yet to read the NYT's reporting about Johnson's unusual use of confidentiality agreements, his rebuttal leaves plenty of questions unanswered.One thing's for sure: we'll be watching for that story to drop.Share This Article

China's Zhurong Mars rover, which has been exploring the planet's arid surface since May 2021, has made a fascinating discovery: ancient, "vacation-style" beaches.The findings, detailed in a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer the "clearest evidence yet" that Mars once contained huge bodies of water and therefore could've been amenable to life."Were finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas," said Penn State assistant professor of geology and coauthor Benjamin Cardenas in a statement. "We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand a proper, vacation-style beach."The research adds to a growing body of evidence that the Red Planet was once dominated by water, much like Earth today. Cardenas and his collaborators have previously found evidence of lush streams of water carving channels and craters into the planet's surface millions of years ago.Now it sounds like Mars was likely home to massive oceans as well, which would be "potentially habitable environments," as coauthor and University of California, Berkeley geophysicist Michael Manga told ScienceAlert."Hence the 'follow the water' theme of Mars exploration," he told the outlet. "Most exciting to me was the chance to look beneath the surface at a place we think there could have been an ocean and to see what we think are beach deposits."The Chinese National Space Administration's Zhurong rover has been exploring a massive impact basin, roughly 2,100 miles in diameterand called Utopia Planitia, looking for signs of ancient water or ice. Its ground-penetrating radar allows it to peek below the planet's surface to identify rock formations and sedimentary deposits.Cardenas and his colleagues examined this data, discovering similar "foreshore deposits" with a downward slope closely resembling Earth's beaches."This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water," Cardenas said inthe statement. "When we look back at where the earliest life on Earth developed, it was in the interaction between oceans and land, so this is painting a picture of ancient habitable environments, capable of harboring conditions friendly toward microbial life.""The structures don't look like sand dunes," Manga told ScienceAlert. "They don't look like an impact crater. They don't look like lava flows. That's when we started thinking about oceans."Apart from supporting the hypothesis that Mars' northern hemisphere and its north pole were once covered in a massive ocean, the findings paint a more nuanced picture of how these systems appear to have changed over time."We tend to think about Mars as just a static snapshot of a planet, but it was evolving," Cardenas explained. "Rivers were flowing, sediment was moving, and land was being built and eroded. This type of sedimentary geology can tell us what the landscape looked like, how they evolved, and, importantly, help us identify where we would want to look for past life."It's a particularly promising area,they say, even compared to other water-rich locations."Shorelines are great locations to look for evidence of past life," Manga told ScienceAlert. "It's thought that the earliest life on Earth began at locations like this, near the interface of air and shallow water."Share This Article