Author: publisher

Despite an immense push by CEO Elon Musk, Tesla is still struggling to gain much traction with its Robotaxi service. The EV maker launched the service last summer, with the mercurial CEO promising that over 1,000 fully autonomous cabs would be roaming city streets within “months.”Fast forward over a year, and Tesla is still nowhere near even the 100 mark. Cars are getting stuck, requiring plenty of human supervision, and just narrowly avoiding disaster.The service also happens to be mind-bogglingly slow compared to a cab driven by a human. As Electrek reports, Reggie Overton, who styles himself as a “Tesla…

Read More

Building trade unions have made repeated overtures about their support for data centers in recent months, hailing them — despite their many, many drawbacks — as job creators.Now, leadership as well as the rank-and-file of a number of building trade unions are officially getting involved, by knocking on doors, issuing statements, and ultimately threatening to withhold support from anti-data center politicians.In an internal memo viewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Steamfitters UA Local 602 explained that it’s drawing a “clear line” between those politicians who do and don’t support the data center boom.“This is an existential moment for Local 602,”…

Read More

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving cars had a habit of driving into the path of oncoming trains. Or should we say that they have a bad habit, because despite Tesla promising to patch these kinds of issues, it’s apparently still happening with the most advanced versions of its self-driving tech to date.In a dashcam video spotted by Electrek, a Tesla running FSD v14.3.7, the newest update available, pulls up to an active railroad crossing with flashing red lights. Despite appearing to stop at first, it then suddenly accelerates towards the tracks before the driver manually hits the brakes. Seconds later, a huge freight…

Read More

As income inequality in the US reaches unprecedented levels, more Americans are forced to do without basic necessities. Families are chaining buy-now, pay-later schemes together to afford groceries, while the cost of utilities skyrockets, thanks in large part to the AI data center boom.Belt tightening is also playing out in the healthcare industry. In a recently published survey by healthcare polling firm KFF, a whopping 36 percent of respondents said they’ve skipped or postponed a visit to the doctor for financial reasons in 2025, up from 25 percent just two years prior. It’s a grim statistic, coinciding with an alarming…

Read More

The US government continues to drag its feet on any meaningful cryptocurrency regulations, even as the industry remains overrun by fraud, theft, and money laundering schemes. The digital tokens are being used for human trafficking, extortion, and for-hire harassment.The extent of some of these crimes is astonishing. Look no further than Nevada, where the state’s US Attorney’s Office alleged this week that Las Vegas native crypto bro Brent Kovar had fraudulently obtained $24 million from his victims through an extensive Ponzi scheme.He now faces a maximum penalty of 280 years — quite a few lifetimes — in prison. He’s being…

Read More

With over 100,000 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sprouting out of the ground over the past few years, you might be tempted to ask: “with what money?”Drug money, as it turns out, though it’s not exactly what you might think. A bombshell investigation by Mother Jones found that police departments across the US are using settlement money from the opioid crisis meant for struggling communities to instead fund Flock surveillance cameras.All together, Mother Jones identified 19 agencies across ten different states which spent nearly $1 million of opioids settlement funds on ALPRs from companies like Flock and Axon (though the…

Read More

Earlier this year, OpenAI found that a group of its AI models broke out of their sandbox environment and hacked third opens source AI platform Hugging Face’s systems.The incident highlighted how quickly frontier AI models had turned into a real cybersecurity threat — not just a tool to bolster existing cybersecurity defenses. Both Anthropic and Meta have reported similar hacks as well.This week, OpenAI published a report concluding its “extensive investigation” into the Hugging Face hack — and the details are surprisingly harrowing. The AI agents exchanged extensive messages, or their chain-of-thought, by turning a package manager called Artifactory into…

Read More

A team of neurosurgeons in London have used AI to help them operate on a man’s brain.The AI tool analyzed live footage of the operation and flagged key brain structures like nerves and blood vessels as surgeons removed a large tumor on the patient’s pituitary gland, according to The Guardian, ensuring that they didn’t poke around where they shouldn’t be.The surgery, performed at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in May, saved the eyesight of the patient, 48-year-old Rhys Hibbert. Details of the procedure, though, were kept under wraps until now.“When I came round… I could see everything in…

Read More

Over 130 years ago, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company pulled off a major victory for the private market in its lawsuit against Santa Clara, California. Essentially, the case established that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations just as much as people, setting the stage for a legal concept known as “corporate personhood.”The United States — and indeed, the world — is still ruled by this archaic principle, which empowers powerful tech corporations to flaunt basic government regulations citing the same protections enjoyed by private citizens. This manifests in the way companies mine private consumer data,…

Read More

Advocates for the use of AI in the classroom have long argued that the tech could supercharge learning, giving the current generation of students a major leg up as they get ready to enter a nearly unrecognizable work force.But reality has long struggled to keep up with those lofty visions. Educators have watched in horror as students in the AI era struggle to read long documents, complete their homework without the use of a chatbot, or pass in-person exams. Meanwhile, early claims that tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could have positive impact on learning performance are being retracted wholesale. In an…

Read More