Chatbots may be able to pass medical exams, but that doesn’t mean they make good doctors, according to a new, large-scale study of how people get medical advice from large language models. The controlled study of 1,298 UK-based participants, published today in Nature Medicine from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Nuffield Department of Primary…
Behold, 404 Media’s Super Bowl ad. Yes, we bought a Super Bowl ad. No, we did not spend $8 million. Until now, 404 Media has never done any paid advertising, but we figured why not get in on the country’s biggest ad extravaganza with a message about our journalist-owned, human-focused media company. There are tons…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that had off-Earth offspring, took stock of a mortal threat, productively slept, and sought out old friends. First, what to expect when you’re expecting a star child. Then: how to fight cancer, the nap-plications of lucid dreaming, and why old rats don’t make new…
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 AI bubble hysteria, “just go independent,” and more. JOSEPH: This week we reported how the FBI has been unable to get into a Washington Post reporter’s iPhone…
The Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General is investigating potential privacy abuses associated with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s surveillance and biometric data programs, according to a letter sent to two senators. Last week, we reported that Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine demanded that DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari investigate immigration-related surveillance programs across DHS,…
The Department of Justice redacted the face of the Mona Lisa, a 522-year-old painting of an Italian woman who died centuries ago, as part of its release of files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein. In a PDF of an email with the subject line “simply paris” sent on July 3, 2009,…
According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn…
In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of…
A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network. 404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work. “Search the…
When I was home over Christmas, I was digging through some of my dad’s baseball memorabilia when I came across a copy of the Washington Post from March 7, 1999: “Printing Revolution Spurs New Look,” the lead headline read. The paper was such an incredible artifact that I took photos of each of its pages….
