When David saw his friend Michael’s social media post asking for a second opinion on a programming project, he offered to take a look. “He sent me some of the code, and none of it made sense, none of it ran correctly. Or if it did run, it didn’t do anything,” David told me. David…

In the parking lot of Seven Oaks Element school in South Carolina on one of the first hot days of the year I watched an AI-generated George Washington talk about the American revolution. “Our rights are a gift from God, not a favor from kings or courts,” slop Washington told me. It spoke from a…

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that moved the heavens, coveted crystals, dined on lunar legumes, and got a four-star review. First, humanity has permanently signed its name into the orbital dynamics of the solar system. Take the win! Then, we’ve got the origins of our obsession with sparkly rocks,…

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss a PC repair battle, a revealing comment from an FBI official, and a dangerously dumb narrative. EMANUEL: I want to update those who have been following the…

Privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data that the FBI then used to determine who was allegedly behind an anonymous account affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media. The records provide insight into the sort of data that Proton Mail,…

Clients of a long-running email marketing platform are getting targeted with a phishing campaign telling them that their emails would begin automatically inserting a “‘Support ICE’ donation button” into every email they send. The strategy suggests that scammers are trying to capitalize on people’s revulsion to ICE by coming up with strategies that would cause…

This week we discuss our coverage of the U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran, specifically how Polymarket and Kalshi are letting people profit from death, and that Amazon data centers were on fire after missiles hit Dubai. Then Emanuel talks about how AI translations are adding ‘hallucinations’ to Wikipedia articles. In the subscribers-only section, Sam tells us…

For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not…

Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.  The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative…