During a cruel presidency where many people are in desperate need of hope, the inflatable frog stepped into the breach. Everyone loves the Portland Frog. The juxtaposition of a frog (and people in other inflatable character costumes) standing up to ICE covered in weapons and armor is absurd, and that’s part of why it’s hitting…
An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month. New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision…
On Monday, a publicly-sourced archive of more than 10,000 national park signs and monument placards went public as part of a massive volunteer project to save historical and educational placards from around the country that risk removal by the Trump administration. Visitors to national parks and other public monuments at more than 300 sites across…
A man who works for the people overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile has lost his security clearance after he uploaded 187,000 pornographic images to a Department of Energy (DOE) network. As part of an appeals process in an attempt to get back his security clearance, the man told investigators he felt his bosses spied on him…
A prominent beer judging competition introduced an AI-based judging tool without warning in the middle of a competition, surprising and angering judges who thought their evaluation notes for each beer were being used to improve the AI, according to multiple interviews with judges involved. The company behind the competition, called Best Beer, also planned to…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on…
Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that lived long, played hard, crashed out, and topped it off with a glass of claret. First off, it’s Naked Mole-Rat Week! Or at least it should be, given that there are multiple new studies about these rodents, which are neither moles nor rats,…
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 ransomware gang, book bans, and infrastructure. JOSEPH: I thought I’d give you something from the digital underground that happened last night. So recently a group that…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. A Meta executive in charge of building the company’s metaverse products told employees that they should be using AI to “go 5x faster” according to an internal message obtained by 404 Media . “Metaverse AI4P: Think 5X, not 5%,” the message, posted by Vishal Shah, Meta’s VP of Metaverse,…
A data hoarder on Reddit used AI to create a searchable database of more than 8,100 files about Jeffrey Epstein released by the House Oversight Committee, making it one of the easiest ways to search through a very messy batch of files. The project, called Epstein Archive and released on Github, allows people to search…
