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As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids.A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to the education of their five children.“What I do for history — Cole usually does all their history, which I love, because I’m not the best at history — so Cole steps in about once a week…

Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the…

What’s the point of having a superyacht if you’re forced to share it with some unwashed poors?That’s the calculation the crew of a Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht, Launchpad, apparently made on the billionaire’s behalf, after a skiff near its location in southeast Alaska ran into trouble.According to the Alaska Beacon, a small cruise ship called Wilderness Legacy had to go out of its way to help the crew of a 21-foot boat that had run out of fuel outside Farragut Bay, a body of water south of Juneau. As maritime events go, it’s a pretty common occurrence — Dan…

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved an experimental and controversial new satellite being developed by venture Reflect Orbital to reflect sunlight down onto the Earth to illuminate patches of it at night for paying customers.The purported goal is to allow solar farms to continue generating electricity even after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies. Those may sound like noble ideas on the surface, but the concept comes with major downsides as well.One is that such bright satellites could easily wreck deep space observations. Astronomers were appalled at the news, with the FCC receiving nearly nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing…

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian.But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much personal freedom for its embracers that’s the most hypocritical.According to Zuckerberg, in the future “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7…

Flock had a devious plan to expand its surveillance network past its army of AI-powered license plate scanners.As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”These plans were first revealed last August as part of an intended partnership between Flock and the AI-powered dashcam company Nexar. Now, a presentation document obtained by 404…

Last week, Nieman Lab revealed that USA Today‘s parent company USA Today Co (formerly Gannett) was partnering with AI surveillance firm Palantir to monetize “actionable intelligence” on its audience.According to USA Today CEO Mike Reed, the goal is to “build a common intelligence layer” on reader data to “monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value.”The largest newspaper’s new partnership with the Peter Thiel-cofounded company, which has long been mired in controversy — from collaborating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being linked to US airstrikes that killed over 120 schoolchildren in Iran to its mercurial CEO, who has…

Even as they promise AI will supercharge productivity, tech leaders are sending a clear message: any efficiency gains won’t help individual workers.During a podcast appearance last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t “expect AI” to lead to a shorter four-hour work week. He argued that workers are “secretly” going to be “happy” about being “much busier” and working even harder thanks to AI — a bizarre and out-of-touch comment from a billionaire with extraordinary power over the lives of working people.Now, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has similarly cracked the whip, as Business Insider reports — and he’s…

A quiet war is playing out in rural communities across the country.City council meetings are bursting into conflict as local residents try to keep AI data centers out of their backyards. Americans are starting to see through the promises of tech companies and the local politicians they’ve wooed, realizing that the advantages of hosting a resource-hogging data center in the neighborhood are slim.Yet tech giants are finding creative — and sometimes startlingly dirty — new ways to circumvent local opposition in their quest to build out these sprawling facilities. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon exploited 45-year-old zoning laws…

Water levels in rivers across Europe are reaching astonishing lows lately as a record heatwave continues to bake much of the continent.Images captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite revealed the extraordinary extent of the drought, which is clearly desiccating Europe’s major waterways. Water levels in one of those rivers, the Danube, have become so low that ancient ruins are beginning to surface for the first time in centuries.As Reuters reported, the portion of the Danube that flows through Bulgaria has slowed to a mere trickle, revealing foundations of the Constantine Bridge, a nearly 1,700 year-old structure that was…