Popular Information identified 37 major companies that were actively advertising on X on January 12. Each company was contacted and asked whether they were concerned about paying for ads on a platform that was allowing users to create nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children. All 37 either declined to comment or did not respond.
In his 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become.
It can seem a bit silly to recommend a way to tie your shoes, but some knots are just more secure than others. For decades I have favored two specific shoelace knots: Ian’s Fast Knot and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot. Ian’s Fast Knot is done so effortlessly as to look like a magic trick, and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has never failed me.
RAM prices have soared, which is bad news for people interested in buying, building, or upgrading a computer this year, but it’s likely good news for people exasperated by talk of so-called AI PCs.
McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an artificial intelligence tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs.
Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.
The first thing we do when we wake up is check our phones for new messages, emails, alerts from our apps, or scroll whichever endless feed captivates our attention. We’ve done this for years.
Recruitment advertisements for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are no longer running on Spotify, the streaming service has confirmed. Variety was the first outlet to report the news.
A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technology has built a prototype electric car with a built-in toolbox and components that can be easily repaired or replaced without specialist knowledge.
In an effort to safeguard young people from the ills of digital life, policymakers around the world have been instituting forced distance between teenagers and their tech. Australia banned social media for those under 16 in December, and New York joined more than a dozen other states in banishing cellphones from the classroom this fall.
None of this is accidental. Elon Musk has been positioning Grok as the “anti-woke” alternative to other chatbots since its launch. That positioning has consequences. When you market your AI as willing to do what others won’t, you’re telling users that the guardrails are negotiable. And when those guardrails fail, when your product starts generating child sexual abuse material, you’ve created a monster you can’t easily control.
“People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” said Bengio. “Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.
Code is not an asset – it’s a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don’t exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks:
During a golden sunset in Memphis in May, Sharon Wilson pointed a thermal imaging camera at Elon Musk’s flagship datacentre to reveal a planetary threat her eyes could not. Free from pollution controls, the gas-fired turbines that power the world’s biggest AI supercomputer were pumping invisible fumes into the Tennessee sky.
A few days ago X introduced a new AI Image Editing button that lets any user modify images posted by others, even without the original uploader’s consent. Image owners are not notified when edits are made, and the feature is enabled by default with no opt-out option (at least not so far).
It won’t be much of a surprise to regular readers or listeners of my podcast that digital sovereignty and getting off US tech has been on my mind a lot this year. It actually started in 2024, when I worked on a white paper about digital sovereignty with some European and Latin American colleagues even before Donald Trump won reelection in the United States. It was published weeks later, and set the tone for my work heading into 2025 and the tumult that Trump brought to global politics.
Computerworld columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols is warning that foreign tech workers are avoiding attending US events and are not interested in jobs in the Land of the Fee.
Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI models as future threats to human civilization or the seedlings of future gods, it’s starting to look like hype is giving way to pragmatism: Today’s AI can be very useful, but it’s also clearly imperfect and prone to mistakes.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) has published a new update to its device market outlook, and the message is blunt: things are getting worse. Under newly-reported pessimistic scenarios, shipments of PCs could shrink by up to 9% in 2026, with a more moderate scenario showing a 5% shrinkage in the market. These figures have been revised from a 2.5% drop, which was recently published in IDC’s November forecast.
How the upcoming AI legislations around the world, like voice cloning prevention and disclosure requeriment of techincal details of models, will affect open source or selfhosted models?
The topic has been debated since April, when the EU Commission first unveiled “ProtectEU,” a strategy aiming to create a roadmap for “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement.” The Commission then presented the Roadmap in June, which outlined an intent to decrypt citizens’ private data by 2030.
Ivry: Back in 2023, you wrote an essay, a speculative essay called “A Public Option for Social Media.” And in this hypothetical public option for social media, it would be state run, and it would be called StateBook. Can you tell us a little bit about this idea of StateBook? What would it be? How would it work? And why are you laughing?
Why are most machine learning models (not frameworks) written in Python? Even through almost any programming language can be used for machine learning?
Users voted to restrict Anthropic’s Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.
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