4 AI-generated images of child sexual abuse are proliferating online This is going to make an already very hard job for law enforcement even harder. (NYT $) 5 Autonomous fighter jets are on the horizon European defense start-up Helsing just completed two successful test flights. (FT $) + Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review) 6 What happened to all the human bird flu cases? Since February, the CDC has not recorded a single new case in the US. (Undark) 7 An interstellar object is cruising through the solar system And it’s giving astronomers a chance to test out early theories of interstellar-object-ology (yes, that’s what it’s called!) (The Economist $) + Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever. (MIT Technology Review) 8 Apple is planning its first upgrade to its Vision Pro headset But no matter what upgrades it’s got, it’s going to be a real struggle to revive its flagging fortunes. (Bloomberg $) 9 Where have all the mundane social media posts gone? Normies used to be what made social media good. We miss them and their photos of their breakfasts. (New Yorker $) + It’s heartening to see that ‘missed connection’ posts are making a comeback, though. (The Guardian) 10 A global shortage is turning MatchaTok sour But it’s pretty easy to explain why it’s in short supply: the whole world’s started going mad for it. (WSJ $) Quote of the day “You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission. To most, it’s not even clear what our mission is.” —Tijmen Blankevoort, an AI researcher at Meta, explains why he thinks expensive hires alone might not cure the company’s woes, The Information reports. One more thing MIKE MCQUADE The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken on a digital camera in 2013, when she was almost one, but now lives on Google Photos. But what if, one day, Google ceased to function? What if I lost my treasured photos forever? For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. The endeavor raises complex questions. What is important to us? How and why do we decide what to keep—and what do we let go? And how will future generations make sense of what we’re able to save? Read the full story.