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As far as completely pointless ways to kill time on your phone, this is certainly one of the weirdest on record.Behold the all-new invention of so-called “dopamine sites” — digital domains where you can browse and hunt for deals on nonexistent wares and services. Clothes, food delivery, you name it: you can pretend-shop for it all. You don’t actually buy anything, crucially. You’re just pretending to have money to buy the things you want. It’s window-shopping reimagined for the age of doomscrolling.But it’s also a little more than that. These cleverly-built sites simulate the experience down to checking out and “tracking”…

Frontier AI labs are seemingly in a race to melt the impressionable minds of underage users into a puddle.For years now, we’ve watched individuals under the age of 18 become obsessed with social AI companions, an alarming trend that has already had catastrophic consequences, from chatbots encouraging them to engage in self-harm to even being implicated in a series of deaths. And that’s without getting into the growing wave of evidence that AI is undermining education in profound ways.The vast majority of AI labs happen to be headquartered in California, a state whose governor is now trying to get ahead…

Armed with sordid tales of rogue AI agents escaping containment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has found plenty of success using scare tactics to call for friendly regulation in the name of AI safety.Now, it seems Altman is riding the wave of AI fearmongering to gin up some new business partners: the electric utility executives whose companies make up the US power grid.As first reported by Politico, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT held a series of clandestine meetings with leaders from top electric utility companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, starting in July.One of the…

In case you thought the extreme backlash against automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) was excessive, a veteran police investigator was just arrested after conducting over 4,000 unauthorized searches using the software provided by Flock Safety.According to New York’s NEWS10, Albany County Sheriff’s Office senior investigator Laurie Moore was arrested on Wednesday after conducting thousands of allegedly illegal searches on five different subjects.One of the victims of Moore’s alleged ALPR abuse was reportedly her ex-girlfriend, whose license plate was reportedly queried in the system 3,000 separate times. Four additional vehicle plates were also searched hundreds of times each, bringing the grand…

GLP-1 weight loss drugs are changing lives in more ways than one.In a new piece for The Guardian, the newspaper’s readers share how the weight loss journey that drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro have set them down on have drastically affected their interpersonal relationships — sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Many of the GLP-1 users seem to harbor a sense of shame, hiding their use of the drugs. In their minds — and perhaps in the minds of those around them — they undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes with losing weight the old fashioned…

Did the Earth once have a larger cousin that was devoured by the Sun? And more importantly: would we have any way of knowing it did?A team of astronomers believe that the answer to both of those questions is “yes.”Like investigators at a crime scene, a team of researchers say they’ve discovered a method to dust for “fingerprints” in the Sun to find strong evidence of planetary filicide in its past.Their resulting study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that the devoured rocky world — which is believed to have been a so-called super-Earth several…

Surely our creaking gerontocracy is well-equipped to respond to a technology as novel, disruptive, and rapidly evolving as AI, right?Well, we hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but a new piece from Politico makes it sure sound like that Congress is completely stumped by how to tackle AI, with over a dozen lawmakers and congressional aides venting to the newspaper about the lack of urgency on the Hill over regulating the tech. Many questioned whether elected representatives fully grasp, or are even capable of grasping, the technology they’re dealing with.“There is a percentage of my colleagues who are still trying to…

The surveillance state is trying out a new tactic: pocket watching.404 Media reports on how secretive “predictive policing” units in the US Border Patrol are analyzing Americans’ financial activity and using it as a pretext to pull them over — even if they’re not suspected of a specific crime.Predictive policing, the practice of identifying possible criminal activity by analyzing broader patterns in absence of direct evidence, is highly controversial. Delving into individual citizens’ financial data represents a significant escalation of these tactics.According to the investigation, the Border Patrol units in question are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). Rather than…

You wouldn’t be remiss to accuse college students using AI to cheat of being lazy. But some of the wilier ones are putting in the hard work to make sure their LLM-generated answers avoid detection from their nosy pedagogues.New York Magazine interviewed some of these clever cheats in a recent piece, who are well aware that by by now, many professors are wise to students’ tricks and are changing the assignments they give and deploying increasingly powerful tech to weed out any illicit AI assistance.One student named Jared attending New York University took his introductory calculus class’s use of WebAssign,…

The legendary German director Werner Herzog had a few choice words about other so-called “filmmakers” who use AI to imitate their inspirations — one of those inspirations being himself.In an interview with IndieWire, the 84-year-old — whose wide-ranging filmography includes 1982’s “Fitzcarraldo,” 2009’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” and 1979’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre“ — was asked about a 2025 movie called “About a Hero,” which made heavy use of AI to evoke the style of his films. It gets even more on the nose than that: on top of using an AI-generated script trained on his movies, it also featured…