We start this week with Matthew’s story about an organization tracking the location of AI data centers around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. After the break, Jason tells us all about what Grok got up to over the holiday break, and we ruminate on what the breakdown in the information ecosystem means. In…
Developers making mods and plugins for hentai games and sex toys say Github recently unleashed a wave of suspensions and bans against their repositories, and the platform hasn’t explained why. Developers I spoke to said the community estimated around 80 to 90 repositories containing the work of 40 to 50 people went down recently, with…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Astronomers have discovered an ancient reservoir of gas that is too hot for cosmic models to handle, reports a study published on Monday in Nature. By peering over 12 billion years…
Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. Publisher’s Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a…
A data sharing agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which was designed for ICE to receive the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients, was published as part of a lawsuit earlier this year, with the public now able to see the exact…
A Hilton branded hotel that originally declined to host guests because they were with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has backpedalled, saying in a statement Monday it does “not discriminate against any individuals or agencies and apologize to those impacted.” The episode started earlier on Monday when the official DHS X account posted what…
Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has…
An abridged version of this story appeared in 404 Media’s zine. Get a copy here. The same sort of algorithms that use your face to unlock your phone are being used by cops to recognize you in traffic stops and immigration raids. Cops have access to tools that have scraped billions of images from the…
Welcome back to the Abstract, and Happy New Year! Here are the studies this week that stoked the flames, cooled off, then went feral and rogue. First, the ashy remains of a cremation pyre reveal a rare glimpse of an ancient ritual. Then: Uranus is chilling, ham on the lam, and a Saturn without a…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Mysterious bones that date back seven million years likely belong to the oldest known human ancestor, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. For years, scientists have debated…
