AI is “comically good” at detecting small earthquakes—here’s why that matters. On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 am in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the…
Anthropic study suggests “poison” training attacks don’t scale with model size. Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like…
Arcane hidden options can offer accessibility without confusing the “core” game experience. For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa, torg, ABACABB, and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to…
YouTube will evaluate each request individually, but copyright violators need not apply. A few weeks ago, Google told US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that it would allow creators banned for COVID and election misinformation to rejoin the platform. It didn’t offer many details in the letter, but now YouTube…
Texas requires sensitive info just to check weather and sports scores, Apple says. Apple yesterday announced a plan to comply with a Texas age verification law and warned that changes required by the law will reduce privacy for app users. “Beginning January 1, 2026, a new state law in…
FSD has been crossing into oncoming traffic and ignoring red lights. Last week was a good one for Tesla, as it beat analysts’ estimates for the number of cars it could sell in the third quarter of the year. This week is probably a less good week for Tesla,…
As more sites require IDs for user age verification, expect more such breaches to come. Discord says that hackers made off with images of 70,000 users’ government IDs that they were required to provide in order to use the site. Like an increasing number of sites, Discord requires certain…
The Rubik’s WOWCube is a 2×2 cube with modern twists. The Rubik’s Cube has been reinvented with more games and many more screens for much more money. What has long been cherished as a simple toy yet complex puzzle requiring nothing but a healthy amount of twisting, turning, and…
“You don’t have to claim that they’re aliens to make these exciting.” A few days ago, an inscrutable interstellar interloper made its closest approach to Mars, where a fleet of international spacecraft seek to unravel the red planet’s ancient mysteries. Several of the probes encircling Mars took a break…
Workers with ropes could make the moai “walk” in zig-zag motion along roads tailor-made for the purpose. Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island…
