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 getting stories from Twitter, the metaverse, and the new game Marathon. EMANUEL: I think I’m addicted to Twitter again. We haven’t written a ton about the war…
The tiny city of Ypsilanti, Michigan, is worried about being a target for drone strikes thanks to a planned datacenter that the University of Michigan is building to support nuclear weapons research According to Douglas Winters, the city’s attorney, the University and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) “have put a big bulls eye target on…
Tinder plans to let machine vision algorithms loose on your camera roll. Instead of building a profile on their own, AI will scan users’ locally-stored photos—everything from gym selfies to pictures of their family, sensitive documents and dick pics—to help construct profiles by determining what users’ interests and values are. Dating apps are the go-to…
North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year. For a brief few days, he literally put North Oaks on the map. And then…
The Executive Office of the President registered the domain aliens.gov on Wednesday a little after 6:30 AM according to a bot that monitors federal domains. There’s no associated website just yet, but the registration comes a month after Trump said he would direct the government to release files related to aliens and UFOs to the…
This week we start with Joseph’s series of articles about the DOGE depositions. He watched hours and hours of them, then a judge ordered them removed from YouTube. But, they’ve already been archived all over the web. After the break, Jason tells us about the AI data labelers who are fighting back. In the subscribers-only…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have discovered all five nucleobases—the fundamental components of DNA and RNA—in pristine samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. The finding strengthens…
Over the last few months, various academics and AI companies have attempted to predict how artificial intelligence is going to impact the labor market. These studies, including a high-profile paper published by Anthropic earlier this month, largely try to take the things AI is good at, or could be good at, and match them to…
A judge ordered the reinstatement of a video game developer after he was fired as part of a scheme cooked up by a CEO using ChatGPT. Facing the possibility of paying out a massive bonus to the developer of Subnautica 2, the CEO of publisher Krafton used ChatGPT to create a plan to take over…
Lonely young people are likely better off texting a random stranger than talking to a chatbot, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that first-semester college students who texted a randomly selected fellow first-semester college student every day for two weeks experienced around a nine percent reduction in feelings…
