404 Media reports that Border Patrol's Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) analyze Americans' financial transaction patterns to identify people they suspect of crimes, then tip off local police who stop them under unrelated pretexts. In one case, Montana driver Kyle William Olson was pulled over for an obstructed license plate after a PITT agent flagged his finances as resembling narcotics trafficking patterns, leading to DUI and drug charges over cannabis products from his legal California job.
A veteran chief information security officer describes how everyday tech questions from friends and family have shifted from routine computer troubleshooting to worries about artificial intelligence risks. Drawing on that experience, the CISO lays out four concrete actions individuals can take now to protect themselves as AI-related threats grow more prevalent.
Manischewitz, the 138-year-old Jewish food brand, is rolling out a dating show alongside new products like frozen challah, rugelach, and a food truck serving hot dogs and matzo ball soup. The push comes as the brand aims to modernize its image and reach younger consumers during the Jewish High Holidays, the ten-day period from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.
A Coinbase engineer created 'Stonkfly,' an open-source simulation of a male fruit fly's brain and eyes containing 166,700 neurons and 25.6 million synaptic connections, and set it loose reading candlestick charts to buy, sell or hold cryptocurrencies. The virtual fly perceives price charts as raw pixel data through simulated photoreceptors, acts roughly every 500 milliseconds, and receives a dopamine-like reward signal for profitable trades and an aversive signal for losses, with trading fees also counted as losses.
Branch has released special-edition versions of its Ergonomic Chair Pro made in partnership with Sega, featuring Sonic, Genesis, and Dreamcast-inspired aesthetics. The Sonic model uses a mesh back while the Genesis and Dreamcast versions use vegan leather, with details like controller-inspired wheels and a logo-referencing armrest stripe. A WIRED reviewer tested the Dreamcast edition and found assembly straightforward despite the chair's roughly 50-pound weight.
OpenAI announced its AI agents helped solve a 90-year-old math problem carrying a $1 million prize, building on work by mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, though the solution still requires independent verification. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI rushed to publish after learning of his own unpublished work with Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge, and tried to shape who received credit. The dispute follows Anthropic's recent claim that its Claude model proved thousands of small theorems while formalizing a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
A developer walks through optimizing a basic spin-lock implementation in C++, starting from a naive atomic exchange loop that slows dramatically under contention. Benchmarks show the naive version taking 3.14 ns uncontended but ballooning to 246 ns with four threads, driven by cache-line contention and branch mispredictions. Through iterative refinements, the author achieves a version that is 5.7 times faster and consumes 5.4 times less energy than the original.
Apple has redesigned its Health app, with health VP Sumbul Desai discussing how the company is integrating AI to give users more personalized coaching rather than just raw data. The update aims to help people act on health metrics instead of simply tracking them.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court's dismissal of a 2022 lawsuit accusing Jackson, Mississippi officials of knowingly exposing residents to lead-contaminated tap water. Trump-appointed Judge Kurt Engelhardt ruled that no constitutional right to clean water or truthful government disclosure during a public health crisis exists, even though plaintiffs claimed city officials withheld information and issued boil-water notices that worsened lead exposure.
Researchers pooled data from 137 systematic reviews covering more than 30,000 participants to determine which resistance training variables actually drive strength, muscle growth, power and function gains. They found that most prescription details mattered less than expected, but specific factors like load, volume, and exercise order produced measurable differences in outcomes.
Microsoft is telling enterprises to migrate away from Slmgr.vbs, the VBScript-based tool used to manage Windows product activation, because VBScript itself is being phased out of Windows. The company recommends switching to PowerShell equivalents before VBScript is removed entirely in a future Windows release.
China's Yaogan 50-02 reconnaissance satellite, which had settled into an unusual retrograde orbit roughly 590 miles up, broke apart months after launch. The US Space Force has tracked 43 fragments now circling Earth at altitudes between 372 and 683 miles, and the cause of the breakup remains unannounced, though astronomer Jonathan McDowell speculated it could be a battery explosion or a debris strike.
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