Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry’s "Space Trip"

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Those who tuned in to watch pop star Katy Perry launch in Jeff Bezos' rocket were left largely unimpressed.

Tens of thousands of people tuned in to watch a crew of six women, including pop star Katy Perry, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos' girlfriend Lauren Sánchez, launch to the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere.

The 11-minute mission — which the media breathlessly and erroneously described as the "first all-female space flight" — saw Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket take off from its facility in the West Texas desert, soaring to the very edge of the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.

To call it a revolutionary day in the history of space exploration would be a vast overstatement. While plenty of flattering things can be said about Blue Origin's engineers who developed and built a reliable rocket that has taken dozens of mostly rich people to the edge of space, today's charade was a mostly vacuous media circus.

Basically, it was a bunch of zillionaires enjoying a meaningless thrill ride, put on by the second-richest man in the world. No cutting-edge science, no meaningful victory for womankind — not even the kind of weightlessness experienced by astronauts on board the International Space Station as they orbit the Earth.

The timing in particular was not great, with public sentiment for the ultra-rich — who are currently plundering the federal government, being accused of insider trading on an unprecedented scale, and driving inflation and living costs for average Americans higher — reaching historic lows.

In particularly ironic context, Trump's new administration is forcing NASA to undermine the history of women's spaceflight by taking down web pages about women in leadership and comics about women astronauts.

As such, those who tuned in to watch today's event unfold were left largely unimpressed.

"??Leave them locked in there," one user pleaded in the chat of a livestream hosted by the Associated Press after the crew returned to Earth.

"Intense waste of taxpayer dollars," another wrote.

"Two days of training," one user argued. "I thought one needed to train for going into space for months!!!"

Meanwhile, the one percenters on board the capsule appeared emotionally shaken by their journey into space.

"So I didn't expect to be this emotional, but it's also all the love that was in that capsule and all the heart, and the feelings, and all the things, and like seeing Jeff [Bezos], I went like..." Sánchez said in an interview after stepping out of the capsule and kissing the dirt beneath her feet.

But the chat wasn't seeing it that way.

"??You have no idea what the world is going through… so disconnected," one user wrote.

Perry, who has already been on the receiving end of plenty of criticism for her Blue Origin thrill ride, also appears to have enjoyed the experience.

"I feel super connected to love," Perry said in an interview, beaming. "I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, like, how much love you have to give."

CBS News broadcast journalist and TV personality Gayle King, who was also on board the rocket, appeared to be aware of the ongoing narrative that billionaires were simply going on an extremely expensive thrill ride.

"What happened to us was not a 'ride,' this was a bonafide freakin' flight," a defensive King said in an interview, admitting that she went into it terrified of flying. "I'm so proud of me right now, I still can't believe it."

To King, it was a moment of self-reflection.

"And you look down at the planet, and you think, that's where we came from?" she said. "To me, it's such a reminder about how we need to better, be better. Do better, be better, human beings."

"People are dying, Gayle," one user in the chat wrote.

More on Blue Origin: Olivia Munn Disgusted by Rocket Blasting Katy Perry Into Space

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Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry's "Space Trip"

Scientists Revive Organism Found Buried at Bottom of Ocean

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The dormant algae cells remained buried at the bottom of the Baltic Sea for thousands of years, and made a full recovery once revived.

A team of researchers in Germany have revived algae cells found buried at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where they'd lain dormant for more than 7,000 years.

For millennia, the cells, imprisoned under layers of sediment, were deprived of oxygen or light. But once revived, they showed full functional recovery, the researchers report in a study published in The ISME Journal, firing back up their oxygen production and multiplying again like it was no big deal. 

According to the team, this is the oldest known organism retrieved from aquatic sediments to be revived from dormancy, providing a stunning example of what's possible in the burgeoning field of "resurrection ecology."

"It is remarkable that the resurrected algae have not only survived 'just so,' but apparently have not lost any of their 'fitness,' i.e. their biological performance ability," study lead author Sarah Bolius of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research said in a statement about the work. "They grow, divide and photosynthesize like their modern descendants."

When entering a dormant state, organisms can weather poor environmental conditions by storing energy and lowering their metabolism. Mammals like hedgehogs, for example, accomplish this by hibernating, relying on their body fat to outlast the winter.

But in the Baltic Sea, the conditions are just right to allow some algae to survive far longer than what a typical dormant state would allow. Upon becoming dormant, the phytoplankton cells sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they're gradually buried under accumulating layers of sediment.

These latest specimens were extracted from nearly 800 feet underwater, in an area known the Eastern Gotland Deep. Here, the waters are considered anoxic, meaning they have virtually no oxygen, especially at the lowest depths. Without this element, decomposition can't set in. And with the seafloor acting as a shield, there's no sunlight to damage the dormant algae cells, either. 

In all, algae from nine separate samples were able to be restored after the researchers placed them back in favorable conditions. The eldest was dated to 6,871 years old, plus or minus 140 years, an estimate the researchers could confidently make thanks to the "clear stratification" of the sediment, according to Bolius.

"Such deposits are like a time capsule containing valuable information about past ecosystems and the inhabiting biological communities, their population development and genetic changes," Bolius said.

And that's what's really promising. Bolius believes that by reviving the dormant organisms, they'll also learn more about the environment during the period they originally lived in, such as the water's salinity, oxygen, and temperature conditions.

"The fact that we were actually able to successfully reactivate such old algae from dormancy is an important first step in the further development of the 'Resurrection Ecology' tool in the Baltic Sea," Bolius added. "This means that it is now possible to conduct 'time-jump experiments' into various stages of Baltic Sea development in the lab."

More on ocean life: It Turns Out Sharks Make Noises, and Here's What They Sound Like

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Google Is Allegedly Paying Top AI Researchers to Just Sit Around and Not Work for the Competition

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Google has one weird trick to hoard its artificial intelligence talent from poachers — paying them to not work at all.

Google apparently has one weird trick to hoard its talent from poachers: paying them to not work.

As Business Insider reports, some United Kingdom-based employees at Google's DeepMind AI lab are paid to do nothing for six months — or, in fewer cases, up to a year — after they quit their jobs.

Known as "garden leave," this type of cushy clause is the luckier stepsister to so-called "noncompete" agreements, which prohibit employees and contractors from working with a competitor for a designated period of time after they depart an employer. Ostensibly meant to prevent aggressive poaching, these sorts of clauses also bar outgoing employees from working with competitors.

Often deployed in tandem with noncompetes, garden leave agreements are more prevalent in the UK than across the pond in the United States, where according to the Horton Group law firm, such clauses are generally reserved for "highly-paid executives."

Though it seems like a pretty good gig — or lack thereof — if you can get it, employees at DeepMind's London HQ told BI that garden leave and noncompetes stymie their ability to lock down meaningful work after they leave the lab.

While noncompetes are increasingly a nonstarter in the United States amid growing legislative pushes to make them unenforceable, they're perfectly legal and quite commonplace in the UK so long as a company explicitly states the business interests they're protecting.

Like DeepMind's generous garden leave period, noncompete clauses typically last between six months and a year — but instead of getting paid to garden, per the former's logic, ex-employees just can't work for competitors for that length of time without risking backlash from Google's army of lawyers.

Because noncompetes are often signed alongside non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), we don't know exactly what DeepMind considers a "competitor" — but whatever its contracts stipulate, it's clearly bothersome enough to get its former staffers to speak out.

"Who wants to sign you for starting in a year?" one ex-DeepMind-er told BI. "That's forever in AI."

In an X post from the end of March, Nando de Freitas, a London-based former DeepMind director who now works at Microsoft offered a brash piece of advice: that people should not sign noncompetes at all.

"Above all don’t sign these contracts," de Freitas wrote. "No American corporation should have that much power, especially in Europe. It’s abuse of power, which does not justify any end."

It's not a bad bit of counsel, to be sure — but as with any other company, it's easy to imagine DeepMind simply choosing not to hire experts if they refuse to sign.

More on the world of AI: Trump's Tariffs Are a Bruising Defeat for the AI Industry

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Former OpenAI Employee Rages Against Sam Altman: "Person of Low Integrity"

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A former OpenAI employee is joining Elon Musk's campaign against CEO Sam Altman — and he's got a lot to say about his ex-boss.

Silent Riot

A former OpenAI employee is joining Elon Musk's campaign against CEO Sam Altman — and he's got a lot to say about his former boss.

After jumping ship to Anthropic, which was cofounded by former OpenAI-ers over AI safety and ethics concerns, researcher Todor Markov is now claiming in a new legal filing that his ex-boss is, essentially, a really bad dude.

The root of Markov's complaint, as he explained in his portion of a lengthy amicus brief that also includes statements from 11 other former OpenAI employees, are Altman's alleged lies about non-disparagement agreements that staffers are forced to sign early in their time at the company.

Last year, the researcher discovered the existence of the clause that essentially made him and other departing employees give up their right to ever speak critically about OpenAI if they wanted to keep their vested equity in their multi-billion-dollar former employer. During an all-hands meeting about the controversial clause, Altman claimed he had no knowledge of its existence — only to be caught with egg on his face immediately after when Vox published leaked documents showing that the CEO had signed off on it.

Lying Game

As Markov explained in his declaration, that debacle proved to him that Altman "was a person of low integrity who had directly lied to employees" about the restrictive non-disparagement agreements. This suggested to him that the CEO was "very likely lying to employees about a number of other important topics," including its commitment to building safe artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

In the company's charter, OpenAI promises to "use any influence we obtain over AGI's deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power." According to Markov, that promise was "positioned as the foundational document guiding all of our strategic decisions" — but ultimately, it proved empty.

"I realized the Charter had been used as a smokescreen," he wrote, "something to attract and retain idealistic talent while providing no real check on OpenAI’s growth and its pursuit of AGI."

Like Musk, Markov believes that Altman's attempts to restructure OpenAI into a for-profit entity shows that its charter and mission "were used all along as a facade to manipulate its workforce and the public." Unlike that multi-hyphenate billionaire cofounder, however, the researcher isn't looking to buy anything — and seems mostly to want his voice heard.

More on Altman: This Appears to Be Why Sam Altman Actually Got Fired by OpenAI

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Apple’s AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

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Apple's AI and machine learning group tasked with upgrading Siri is facing just as much scrutiny from its peers as it is from the public.

Apple has floundered in its efforts to bring a convincing AI product to the table — so much so that it's become the subject of derision even among its own employees, The Information reports.

More specifically, it's the AI and machine-learning group that's getting the lion's share of mockery. Known as AI/ML for short, its woes only deepened after Apple announced that it had to delay its much-hyped next iteration of AI enhancements for Siri until 2026. 

With its leadership being increasingly called into question and with seemingly more embarrassments than victories to its name, Apple engineers outside the group bestowed it a cruel nickname: "AIMLess," according to the Information.

The moniker is also a jab at AI/ML's ousted leaders. 

Coinciding with the delay, Apple told staff it was taking its AI chief John Giannandrea off leading the Siri AI project. Giannandrea had a reputation for being relaxed, quiet, and non-confrontational, while his lieutenant Robby Walker was criticized for lacking ambition and being too risk-averse. More than half a dozen former employees who worked in Giannandrea and Walker's group, per the report, blamed poor leadership for the project's struggles.

Giannandrea is being replaced by head of software engineering Craig Federighi, with executive Mike Rockwell, who worked on Apple's mixed reality Vision Pro headset, assuming Walker's duties. Federighi has led Apple's engineering team since 2012, earning a reputation for efficiency and execution. His leadership style is the opposite of Giannandrea's: tough and demanding, according to the Information. 

The two bigwigs often butted heads, with resentment building between the Siri group and the software group, which had its own crew of AI engineers. The release of OpenAI's ChatGPT deepened the fissure: Gianandrea's team didn't respond with a sense of urgency, according to former engineers, while Federighi's outfit immediately started exploring the use of large language models to improve the iPhone. 

At a critical moment in the AI race that called for decisiveness, the Siri team wavered. After teasing major upgrades to Siri at Apple's annual developers conference, Giannandrea and company couldn't decide whether to build an LLM that would run locally on a user's iPhone or build a bigger one that would run on the cloud to handle more complex tasks. In the end, they went with Plan C: build one huge model to handle everything, according to the Information, undoing the company's commitment to keeping Siri's software on-device, and putting it on the path to a delayed rollout.

Since then, the straits haven't looked any less dire. After all the hype, many users felt that Apple Intelligence was lackluster at best. Apple also faced significant backlash after one of its features for summarizing news headlines constantly misreported them, forcing Apple to pull the plug.

While many in the company are hopeful that the injection of new leadership can salvage Siri's botched AI facelift, getting itself on even footing in the AI race is going to be an uphill battle, even for Apple.

More on Apple: Apple Secretly Working on AirPod Feature That Translates Speech in Real-Time

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Apple's AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It

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ADHD drugs may have bizarre side effects for kids who take them while they're growing — and it's a tall order as to whether they're worth it.

As wildly overinvolved parents shell out to give their kids growth hormones to make them taller, some research suggests that putting them on drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have the opposite effect.

As the New York Times reports, the scientists behind the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or MTA Study for short, weren't exactly looking for physiological changes in their subjects: a cohort of 579 kids with ADHD, some of whom were given methyphenidate (better known as Ritalin), counseling, a mix of the two, or neither.

Beginning in 1994, researchers across the country began tracking outcomes of children who were seven to ten years old at the start of the study. After 36 months, the researchers realized something odd: that the children who had been given the popular stimulant seemed to be growing more slowly than their non-medicated counterparts.

The researchers presumed, per their retelling to the NYT, that this "height gap" would close in adolescence. When they followed up with them nine years after the study began, however, the medicated cohort was still 1.6 inches, on average, shorter than the kids who didn't take Ritalin.

On a certain level, the concern is very shallow. There's nothing wrong with being short, and if a drug can help with a myriad of other symptoms, maybe the risk is worth it.

But that's not the only controversy around prescribing ADHD drugs to kids. The MTA study's biggest takeaway was, troublingly, that the attention benefits of Ritalin seemed to cease after the first year, and that there were no apparent benefits to academic performance.

And even on top of that, the "height suppression" side effect was also enough to give the researchers pause.

In 2017, the MTA study scientists published a follow-up looking into the height gap that tracked the original cohort until they were 25. That height gap remained, per the study, into adulthood. And the findings countered bold academic assertions from just a few years prior claiming that any height suppression from ADHD meds in children would, as the researchers initially presumed, ultimately be undone in adolescence.

Years later, another group of scientists reviewed 18 childhood Ritalin studies and found, similarly to the MTA researchers, that the drug can indeed "result in reduction in height and weight" — though their opinion was that the size of the effect is negligible when compared to the purported benefits of these drugs.

To this day, researchers can't agree as to whether or not stimulants can cause height suppression in children, primarily because the mechanism behind the demonstrated effect remains unknown.

Speaking to the website Health Central in 2022, childhood psychiatrist and MTA study co-author Laurence Greenhill of the University of California, San Francisco suggested that amphetamines' well-known propensity to suppress appetite could be behind the growth differences.

"There could be some lack of nutrition going on that explains this," Greenhill told the website.

"However, the kids aren't malnourished," he countered. "They're just growing a little more slowly."

If Ritalin or other stimulants help a child significantly, such a minor height disparity would be worthwhile. But with some of the original MTA study authors now questioning how effective these medical interventions really are, it may behoove parents to think before they put their kids on these pills.

More on ADHD meds: To Fill Your Adderall Prescription Amid Shortage, Try Getting It Filled on This Particular Day of the Month

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Giving ADHD Drugs to Kids Has a Long-Term Side Effect That Might Change Their Minds About Taking It

Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Space

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Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez say their trip to space was path-paving step for women — as NASA removes images of women from its walls.

Upon returning to Earth on Monday following her 11-minute trip to Earth's outer atmosphere onboard a Blue Origin spacecraft, pop star Katy Perry — still decked in her custom blue flightsuit and full-coverage glam — told reporters that her brief adventure in low orbit was for "future women." And "Earth." Or both, we guess?

"It's about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging," Perry gushed, explaining that she sang Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" whilst in orbit onboard the Blue Origin's New Shepard. "And it's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it."

"This is all for the benefit of Earth," she added.

Perry's word salad is, in part, a callout to the six-person flight crew's all-woman makeup, which has been central to the spectacle's framing. That's not an accident: the flight was organized by Lauren Sánchez, the former news anchor and helicopter pilot best known today as fiancée to Blue Origin's founder and the world's second-richest man Jeff Bezos, with Sánchez cryptically telling Vogue back in 2023 that the mission — then still in its nascency — would be "paving the way for women." (It was later revealed that Sánchez would be joined by Perry; the journalist and broadcast personality Gayle King; film producer Kerianne Flynn; civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen; and Aisha Bowe, a former aerospace engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.)

To be clear, Monday's flight didn't mark the first time that a rocket made it out of Earth's atmosphere without a man onboard. That honor belongs to Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who became the first woman in space after making a solo trip into the cosmos back in 1963. And while all these women are certainly accomplished in their respective fields, there's an insidious hollowness to the sweeping characterization of the flight as a great achievement for women that's somehow paving roads for aspiring future space travelers — particularly by Perry and Sánchez — that's deeply, and cynically, at odds with the way that new federal mandates about diversity policies are actively working to erase women's legacy in American space exploration.

As has been widely reported, NASA has been incredibly hard-hit by the Trump Administration's chaotic and widespread attacks on what it refers to as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. Last month, the Orlando Sentinel first reported, NASA scrubbed language from a webpage about the agency's Artemis missions declaring that a goal of the mission was to put the first woman and first person of color on the Moon; just a few days later, NASA Watch reported that comic books imagining the first woman on the Moon had been deleted from NASA's website.

A webpage for "Women at NASA" is still standing, but pictures of women and people of color — astronauts, engineers, scientists — have reportedly been removed from NASA's real-world hallways amid the so-called "DEI" purge. Per Scientific American, the word "inclusion" has been removed as one of NASA's core pillars. And as 404 Media reported in February, NASA personnel were directed to remove mentions of women in leadership positions from its website.

These purges haven't just impacted the hard-earned visibility for women and minorities at NASA and across the American space sciences, whose work has been integral to the furthering of American space exploration. As The Verge reported last month, the administration's anti-DEI mandates — which intersect with ongoing confusion and chaos around federal funding cuts and layoffs, scientific censorship, and attacks on universities and research institutions — are wreaking havoc within the American space science landscape at large, threatening to make missions to space less safe.

"The 1986 Challenger disaster — in which seven crew members were killed when their Space Shuttle broke apart shortly after launch — was directly linked to a homogeneity of thought among NASA personnel," wrote acclaimed space journalist Georgina Torbett for the Verge. "The agency's lack of diverse perspectives fed into the tendency toward groupthink that contributed to the disaster, while research has shown that more cultural and ethnic diversity in groups leads to more creative and higher quality ideas — and lower risks for space missions."

Though Blue Origin and its most famous flyers repeatedly promoted the 11-minute journey as a push to get a diverse mix of young people interested in the sciences and achieving their dreams — Perry, for her part, told Elle Magazine for a pre-launch cover story that she hoped the trip would "inspire a whole new generation and make space and science glam" — nothing about the flight was particularly scientific or boundary-pushing. This was Blue Origin's eleventh successful space tourism flight. And while two of the flight's crewmembers do have backgrounds in STEM, as Amanda Hess noted in The New York Times, the crew's "central mission" wasn't to conduct science but "to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it."

"They are like payload specialists," Hess wrote, "with a specialty in marketing private rockets."

And then there's Blue Origin's founder, to which the supposedly historic all-women crew is inextricably linked. On the same day that president Donald Trump issued the executive order that caused NASA to erase its declaration that it would soon put a diverse group of astronauts on the Moon, and peel images celebrating the diversity of its spacefarers and scientists from its walls, Bezos stood — alongside several other billionaire Big Tech CEOs, together on prominent display — behind the returning commander-in-chief. (Several months before, Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, killed the paper editorial board's endorsement of then-vice-president Kamala Harris for president, and has since reorientied its opinion pages in "support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.") Next to him was Sánchez. For the occasion, she wore suffragette white.

In case you're wondering, the space travelers didn't have anything to say about NASA's purge of material about women or the Trump administration's attack on science. Instead, speaking to Elle ahead of the flight, the crewmates discussed wearing makeup and doing their hair for the brief spaceflight.

"Who would not get glam before the flight?!" Sánchez told the magazine.

"Space is going to finally be glam," added Perry. "If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

In Perry's case, her vacant brand of empowerment feels sadly reminiscent of her recent refusal to address criticism of her decision to work with the music producer ?ukasz "Dr. Luke" Gottwald on her latest album, including to produce an attempt at a feminist anthem titled "Woman's World." In 2014, fellow musician Kesha Sebert — of "TiK ToK" fame — filed a bombshell lawsuit accusing Gottwald of drugging and raping her shortly after she signed to his record label at the age of 18, and subjecting her to years of "mental manipulation" and "emotional abuse" thereafter (Gottwald quickly sued Sebert for defamation, and the two parties finally settled the case in 2023 after a decade-long legal battle.)

When asked about working with Gottwald for her recent album on the popular "Call Her Daddy" podcast, Perry didn't seem to think it was a big deal.

"Look, I understand that it started a lot of conversations," Perry meekly responded, adding that Gottwald "was one of many collaborators that I collaborated with."

As Hess notes for the NYT, over 100 women have gone to space since Sally Ride's historic 1983 flight; even so, women remain deeply underrepresented in astronomy and space exploration. And to that end, going to space for the good of all women, or the "benefit of Earth," or even to make science "glam," are much better stories than "a centibillionaire and his fiancée said I could go to space on their penis-shaped rocket, I wanted to go, and I wanted to look good for it."

At best, Perry and Sánchez are cosplaying in ChatGPT-generated feminism, searching for excuses to paint billionaire-funded space tourism as something more than what it was. At worst, though, their framing of their mission as a path-carving, glass-shattering step for women obfiscuates the very real attacks on women and minorities across the American sciences that threaten the legacy of the real women spacefarers and scientists who came before Sánchez, Perry, and company — and in turn, the direction of the young women who dream of furthering American space exploration in the future.

More on The Perry Flight: Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry's "Space Trip"

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Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Space

California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety System

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America's first nuclear power plant to use artificial intelligence is, ironically, the last operational one in California. 

America's first nuclear power plant to use artificial intelligence is, ironically, the last operational one in California.

As CalMatters reports, the Diablo Canyon power plant is slated to be decommissioned by the end of this decade. In the interim, the plant's owner, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), claims that it's deploying its "Neutron Enterprise" tool — which will be the first nuclear plant in the nation to use AI — in a series of escalating stages.

Less than 18 months ago, Diablo Canyon was hurtling headlong toward a decommissioning that would have begun in 2024 and ended this year. In late 2023, however, the California Public Utility Commission voted to stay its execution for five years, kicking the can on the inevitable to 2029 and 2030, respectively.

Just under a year after that vote, PG&E announced that it was teaming up with a startup called Atomic Canyon, which was founded with the plant in mind and is also based in the coastal Central California town of San Luis Obispo. That partnership, and the first "stage" of the tool's deployment, brought some of Nvidia's high-powered H100 AI chips to the dying nuclear plant, and with them the compute power needed for generative artificial intelligence.

Running on an internal server without cloud access, Neutron Enterprise's biggest use case, much like so-called AI "search engines," is summarizing a massive trove of millions of regulatory documents that have been fed into it. According to Atomic Canyon CEO and cofounder Trey Lauderdale, this isn't risky — though anyone who has used AI to summarize information knows better, because the tech still often makes factual mistakes.

Speaking to CalMatters, PG&E executive Maureen Zalawick insisted that the AI program will be more of a "copilot" than a "decision-maker," meant to assist flesh-and-blood employees rather than replace them.

"We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures," Zalawick explained. "And that’s going to shrink that time way down."

Lauderdale put it in even simpler terms.

"You can put this on the record," he told CalMatters. "The AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now."

If that "right now" caveat gives you pause, you're not alone. Given the shifting timelines for the closure of Diablo Canyon in a state that has been painstakingly phasing out its nuclear facilities since the 1970s over concerns about toxic waste — and the fact that Lauderdale claims to be talking to other plants in other states — there's ample cause for concern.

"The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day," cautioned Tamara Kneese of the tech watchdog Data & Society, "I don’t really trust that it would stop there."

As head of Data & Society's Climate, Technology, and Justice program, Kneese said that while using AI to help sift through tomes of documents is worthwhile, "trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny." This is the same company whose polluting propensities were exposed by the real-life Erin Brokovich in the 1990s, after all.

California lawmakers, meanwhile, were impressed by the tailored usage Atomic Canyon and PG&E propose for the program — but it remains to be seen whether or not that narrow functionality will remain that way.

More on AI and energy: Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI

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Someone Is Hacking Crosswalk Buttons to Speak in the Voice of Elon Musk Lamenting the Terrible Sadness in His Life

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Hackers took over the crosswalk buttons of downtown intersections in several California cities, to play clips of Elon Musk's cloned voice.

Last week, hackers took over the crosswalk buttons of downtown intersections in Palo Alto, Redwood City, and Menlo Park in California, to play seemingly AI-generated clips of Elon Musk's voice.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the satirical clips mock the billionaires in a number of creative ways, as seen in videos going viral on social media.

While the perpetrator — or perpetrators — have yet to come forward, the hack highlights growing disillusionment and anger aimed at ultra-wealthy tech oligarchs who have accumulated huge amounts of influence and power.

Anti-Musk sentiment, in particular, has surged as of late, with his embrace of far-right extremism and dismantling of federal agencies spawning a major protest movement across the country.

One crosswalk voice clip relentlessly skewers Musk's close — but possibly unraveling — relationship with president Donald Trump.

"You know, it’s funny, I used to think he was just this dumb sack of sh*t," Musk's cloned voice says in a video shared on TikTok. "But once you get to know him, he’s actually pretty sweet and tender and loving."

"Sweetie, come back to bed," a second voice mimicking Trump's replies.

A different clip paints Musk as a lonely billionaire who struggles to maintain friendships and is desperate for attention.

"Hi, I’m Elon Musk," the crosswalk button says in a separate video. "Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know, they say money can’t buy happiness, and yeah, okay, I guess that’s true. God knows I've tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? Right?"

"Fuck, I’m so alone," the Musk-alike added, heartbroken, garnering a major guffaw from the person who hit the button in the video.

"Will you be my friend? I’ll give you a Cybertruck, I promise," the fake Musk begged in a separate clip. "Okay, look, you don’t know the level of depravity I would stoop to just for a crumb of approval."

It's still unclear who's behind the stunt and how they exploited the crosswalks to play these messages, and City officials are investigating. A spokesperson for Palo Alto told Palo Alto Online that the voice feature was disabled until they could fix the issue.

But the damage has already been done, with users on Bluesky calling the stunt "hilarious" and "next level."

"I am sending all of my love to whoever hacked these crosswalk boxes with the Elon voice," one user wrote.

Given previous statements, there could be a degree of truth to the brutal satire.

"There are times when I feel lonely, yes," the SpaceX CEO said during a 2022 interview with Business Insider. "I'm working on the Starship rocket and I'm just staying in my little house by myself, especially if my dog is not with me, then I feel quite lonely because I'm just in a little house by myself with no dog."

Experts have suggested that growing up with an emotionally abusive father, among other instances of childhood trauma, caused him to become increasingly isolated.

The billionaire has also made plenty of enemies over the years, including his ex Claire "Grimes" Boucher, with whom he's had an on-and-off-again relationship for quite some time now, culminating in a nasty custody battle.

Meanwhile, Musk has played the victim card, claiming that he has no idea why he's become a major target of hate lately.

"My companies make great products that people love and I’ve never physically hurt anyone," Musk complained in a tweet last month. "So why the hate and violence against me?"

More on Elon Musk: Tesla Shows Off Cheaper and Slower Cybertruck That's an Even Worse Deal

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Passengers Trapped in Rocket With Katy Perry Wished She Would Sing Something Else

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Katy Perry reportedly broke into song, singing

Singed

This morning, a crew of six women — including pop star Katy Perry, CBS News broadcast journalist and TV personality Gayle King, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos' fiancé Lauren Sánchez — rocketed to an altitude of 66 miles, just past the internationally agreed-upon edge of space.

The 11-minute journey on board Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket appeared to have left a lasting impression on Perry, who was emotionally stirred by the experience.

During the trip, she reportedly broke into song, singing "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, which was originally conceived in the 1960s to bring a fractured nation together following the Kennedy assassination, the beginning of the Vietnam War, and widespread racial injustice.

The other passengers, though? They encouraged Perry to sing one of her own hits instead.

After all, what better time to advertise your own work than during an ultra-expensive and vacuous PR stunt that nobody but the participants have anything to gain from?

Making Space

Perry said that the choice was inspired by some new-age mumbo jumbo.

"I’ve covered that song in the past and obviously my higher self is always steering the ship," she rambled, "because I had no idea that one day I’d be singing that song in space."

After touching down, Perry got on her knees to kiss the dirt below her in a symbolic gesture.

Not long after, the performer had an eye-roll-inducing answer when prompted why she chose to sing Armstrong's classic instead, arguing that wealthy one-percenters going for a thrill ride to space was somehow about female empowerment.

"It's not about singing my songs," she said during an interview following the launch. "It's about a collective energy and making space for future women. It's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it."

"This is all for the benefit of Earth," she added.

But how exactly a brief trip to the edge of space is of any benefit to the planet remains to be seen.

Unfortunately, while she didn't opt for her own work during the launch, Perry did promise to write an entire song inspired by her seemingly life-changing trip — an homage we could probably do without.

More on the launch: Chat Relentlessly Mocks Katy Perry's "Space Trip"

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Nobel-Winning Scientist Says His Researchers Are Fleeing the Country Because of Trump’s Cruelty

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Around 15 of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist David Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US.

Last year, University of Washington School of Medicine professor of biochemistry David Baker won the Nobel Prize for his work on designing proteins that can be used in drugs, vaccines, materials, and sensors.

But now that the Trump administration has begun to diminish the role of research and gut scientific funding, around 15 of Baker's graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are looking to leave the US, NBC News reports.

A major funding squeeze is forcing Baker and his colleagues at the Institute for Protein Design to reevaluate and cut back.

"There’s so many amazing people who want to come in, and we can’t take them," he told NBC. "The Nobel Prize was just a little blip. But things have gotten quite bleak."

Trump's war on science in the US has sparked concerns over a major brain drain, with a Nature poll of more than 1,200 scientists finding that a startling 75 percent are now considering leaving the country.

The Trump administration has gutted federal agencies, with the National Institutes of Health ringing the alarm bells following massive layoffs and budget cuts. Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been ordered to be canceled by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

"Right now, due to the funding cuts, we are unable to enroll any more participants into federally funded studies, or start new studies, or do really any new work," UW Medicine infectious disease researcher Rachel Bender Ignacio, who cut her own salary to distribute money to the rest of other staffers, told NBC.

Even politically uncontroversial lines of research, including Alzheimer's and cancer, have been swept up in a major shrinking of funding, which could lead to significant slowdowns in progress toward treatments, cures, and other interventions.

"We’ve gone through a bunch of contingency planning," University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center director Thomas Grabowski told NBC, referring to grant decisions slowing to a crawl. "When it starts to look like multiple, multiple, multiple months, then there’s not a good answer to your question."

The university received about 1,2200 grants from the NIH, worth around $648 million, last year. This year that approval process ground to a halt, and more than 600 grants are still in limbo.

Scientists are now in the dark, awaiting some much-needed clarity from the agency, which has spent much of its resources pointlessly chasing after president Donald Trump's number-one bogeyman: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

"The fact that they’re cutting these things or putting them in limbo is really upsetting, and you know, I feel like they’re doing surgery with a chainsaw at the federal level," retired attorney Andrea Gilbert, who had undergone treatment for Alzheimer's disease under Grabowski's care, told NBC News.

More on the NIH: Trump Administration Throws Cancer Research Into Turmoil

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Zillionaire Girlbosses Astonished by Backlash to Their Frivolous Trip to Space

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The widespread backlash and criticism to Blue Origin's all-women trip to

Earlier this week, a crew of six women — including pop star Katy Perry, CBS broadcast journalist Gayle King, and Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos' fiancée Lauren Sánchez — launched to the edge of space as part of an 11-minute thrill ride organized by the Amazon cofounder's space company.

The vacuous publicity stunt — which claimed to make the crew of mostly uber-wealthy media personalities "astronauts" after a mere two days of basic safety training — drew plenty of criticism.

After all, apart from spending an obscene amount of money and rattling off cringeworthy statements about "making space for future women," the crew had little to contribute to science, discourse, or meaningful feminism.

Put simply, the collective eye-rolls the stunt induced could've been visible from space.

Yet the widespread backlash came to the surprise of crew members, who had allegedly been inundated by messages from inspired fans.

"Anybody that’s criticizing doesn’t really understand what is happening here," King said during an interview following the launch, as quoted by People magazine. "We can all speak to the response we’re getting from young women, from young girls, about what this represents."

Bezos' multimillionaire fiancée also said that the criticism got her "fired up," arguing that Blue Origin employees had "put their heart and soul into this vehicle" — while she laid down on a padded, reclining seat to rocket into space.

Several other high-profile celebrities took a swipe at the publicity stunt.

"Billion dollars bought some good memes I guess," actor Olivia Wilde wrote in a Monday Instagram post, as quoted by People.

"Space exploration was to further our knowledge and to help mankind," she argued, while hosting an NBC daytime TV show earlier this month. "What are they gonna do up there that has made it better for us down here?"

Comedian Amy Schumer also skewered the trip in a video.

"Guys, last second, they added me to space, and I’m going to space," she said sarcastically.

Model Emily Ratajkowski had an even stronger reaction, noting that she was "literally disgusted" by the "beyond parody" stunt. In a TikTok video, she pointed out that while the optics of women of color going to "space" looked great on paper, the stunt had little to do with actual progress.

"Instead it just speaks to the fact that we are living in an oligarchy where there's a very small group of people who are interested in going into space for the sake of getting a new lease on life, while the rest of the population... are worried about paying rent or [providing] dinner for their kids," Ratajkowski said.

Other onlookers also noted the baffling demonstration of privilege by the ultra-rich.

"If Jeff Bezos can send Katy Perry into space, he can pay a wealth tax so every American has debt-free healthcare," educator and activist Nina Turner wrote in a post on Bluesky.

However, the widespread criticism appeared to have fallen on deaf ears.

"This is a freaking journey," a defensive King said during a post-launch interview. "It was not a joyride."

"I’m not going to let you steal our joy," she added while addressing her "haters."

More on the stunt: Katy Perry Boasts About Ridiculous Rocket Launch While NASA Is Scrubbing History of Women in Space

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Zuckerberg Encourages Theatergoers to Use Their Phones While Movie Is Playing

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now actively rallying theatergoers to use their accursed smartphones when they're at the movies.

Uncontent with merely turning Facebook and Instagram into right-wing hellscapes of AI slop, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now actively rallying theatergoers to pull out their glowingly annoying smartphones when they're at the movies.

As Variety reports, Meta is teaming up with the horror film studio Blumhouse to bring the "second screen" experience to its single-night re-release of "M3GAN" on April 30.

Dubbed "Halfway to Halloween," the production company's limited engagement will also include "Annabelle" and "Ma," two of its other big hits — but it's clear that "M3GAN," with its hotly anticipated upcoming sequel, is the star of the show.

Using chatbot technology that Meta refers to as "Movie Mate" — a new spin, perhaps, on Zuckerberg's cringey push to get his subordinates to refer to each other as "Meta Mates" back when he was all-in on virtual reality — fans will be able to talk to an AI version of the iconic robot.

There is, however, a catch.

"Movie Mate is only available to moviegoers who are in a theater," the studio explained in a statement provided to Variety, "and works by DM'ing the Instagram account @M3GAN account to start the experience."

When we asked Meta how this location-specific gambit works, a company spokesperson told Futurism that a "code will be displayed on the movie screen prior to the trailers" to verify that users are in the theater, and they would subsequently be provided with instructions on how to initiate the DM convo. Though that's better than using some sort of creepy geofencing, it also sounds like it requires a non-minimal amount of effort — which equals, of course, more light pollution inside dark theaters packed with patrons for the single-night screenings.

Beyond the "M3GAN" chatbot, the promotion will also include more traditional marketing incentives like "sneak peeks, exclusive recorded messages from directors and talent from the films, and surprise special appearances in select markets," Blumhouse said in its statement.

Amid this desperate attempt to make Meta relevant post-Metaverse, many folks are not thrilled at the thought of studios intentionally and actively encouraging people to ruin the movie theater experience.

"I feel like M3GAN would actually kill moviegoers who used [Movie Mate]," one Bluesky user quipped.

"It's feeling like we've lost the fight on this one," Bloody Disgusting editor-in-chief John Squires tweeted, "and the next generation of the theater-going experience will be tailored to the youth and the way they consume movies, which is very different than the way most of us do."

"Hollywood will likely lean in," he continued. "And maybe they have to."

In response to the news, the Alamo Drafthouse theater chain confirmed to Variety that it won't be participating in the monstrous "Movie Mate" campaign — though, to be fair, that decision could be an attempt to gain back goodwill from pro-labor cinephiles who boycotted during a recently-ended strike protesting layoffs.

Though Meta is far from the first company to attempt this kind of ghoulish "second screen marketing," bringing it to theaters — and to a single-night engagement in particular — is indeed horrific.

More on Meta: Instagram Showing Users Grotesque Videos of Human-Animal Hybrids

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Horrifying Results as Man Exercises Only One Single Muscle

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In a grotesque twist to the online trend of

In a grotesque twist to the online trend of "looksmaxxing," a term referring to male incels looking to maximize their own physical attractiveness, a TikTok user has spent over 160 days working out just a single trapezius muscle.

In daily update videos, the college student, who goes by the fitting online handle TheCrookedMon, showed off the results of his unorthodox "looks minimizing" strategy: a massively imbalanced shoulder muscle diagonally — and unsettlingly — stretching from the left side of his head to his left shoulder.

Why? Besides a modicum of internet clout, we're still not entirely sure.

To get his very particular gains, TheCrookedMon did daily shrugs on his left side only, using a variety of objects, including a dog, a backpack, and a pack of drinks at the grocery store.

Instead of cheering him on, commenters appeared largely concerned for his health.

"Bro you proved your point," one user wrote, with a crying emoji.

"Bro stop please," another comment reads.

Others were more impressed.

"This is literally the biggest flex I've ever seen," one user wrote.

There’s a kid who has only trained one trap for most of a year and it’s one of the most autistic things I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/3d0GRbZPKi

— Bill Coyne (@MiloAgonistes) April 11, 2025

The trend became so big, it spawned an entire memecoin, dubbed $TRAPMAN. According to DexScreener, the coin spiked to a value of $0.00003649 — yes, you read that decimal point correctly — when it launched on April 13. Unsurprisingly, the dubious asset crashed almost immediately, wiping out most of its value.

The jury is still out on whether TheCrookedMon could be damaging his body, but chances are he'll be fine in the long run. Researchers have found that primarily focusing on training just one side of the body could still have plenty of benefits for the other side.

It's a particularly pertinent reality for those recovering from an injury or missing part of their body. Research has shown that training just one side could even build muscle mass in an unused, injured limb through the triggering of neural pathways, a phenomenon referred to as the "cross-training effect" or "cross-education."

However, that doesn't mean we condone the kind of eyebrow-raising workout regimen TheCrookedMon chose for himself — there are far better ways to design a unilateral training plan.

In a tongue-in-cheek April 2 video, he attempted to explain why he intentionally sacrificed his looks.

"I was scrolling TikToks in my Ferrari, and I kept getting these looksmaxxing TikToks," he said. "And they were like, 'Do this, do that, you'll look more attractive, you'll get more women."

"And it's like, people have that problem?" he added. "I've the opposite problem. I get so many DMs I don't even have time to get through them all."

"If I have the opposite problem, then I need the opposite solution," TheCrookedMon argued.

Worse things are on the horizon: Over the past month, TheCrookedMan has now started working out just his right leg.

More on the incel community: A Google-Backed AI Startup Is Hosting Chatbots Modeled After Real-Life School Shooters — and Their Victims

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Tim Cook Has a Strange Obsession

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is far from giving up on virtual and augmented reality headsets, a gadget category that has been rife with risky bets.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is far from giving up on virtual and augmented reality headsets, a gadget category that has been rife with setbacks and risky bets that didn't pan out.

As Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported over the weekend, the tech giant is getting ready to launch not one, but two updated versions of its Vision Pro, a $3,499 mixed-reality headset that has seen sluggish sales and even given wearers black eyes.

That's despite rumors circulating last summer that Apple had given up on a follow-up device of the uber-expensive gadget.

In fact, Cook is so convinced of the segment that he's looking to beat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who shares an obsession with AR and VR headsets — to market. According to Bloomberg, Cook wants to create a pair of AR glasses that buyers can wear all day.

"Tim cares about nothing else," an insider with knowledge of the matter told Gurman. "It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."

But given the segment's well-documented challenges in wooing a mainstream market, that could be far easier said than done. We've seen numerous products fail to live up to the hype, particularly in the VR space.

As far as wearable smart glasses are concerned, Meta has some experience. Its Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, which feature bone-conducting earphones, a camera, and a microphone, have proven surprisingly popular.

However, to call them augmented reality glasses would be an overstatement, as they can't overlay data or other info over the wearer's vision.

Earlier this month, Gurman reported that Meta is looking to follow up its glasses with a $1,000-plus deluxe version, which includes a screen for displaying photos and apps. But details are still pretty sparse and the company has yet to announce a release date.

Whether Apple can swoop in and release a lighter and cheaper pair of AR glasses remains to be seen. Even coming up with a successor to its much beefier and unwieldy Vision Pro headset could prove challenging. According to Bloomberg, the goal is to greatly reduce both weight and price, which is an appreciable challenge, especially considering the possibility of escalating tariffs on Chinese imports.

To make the jump to a light accessory that has the same form factor as a pair of sunglasses is substantial. As a stepping stone, Apple is reportedly looking to attach a camera to its Apple Watch and AirPods, an admittedly awkward answer to Meta's Ray-Ban glasses.

In short, where Cook's obsession with beating Zuckerberg to the punch will leave Apple's foray into the glasses space is anyone's guess — though if there's one thing we know about Apple, it's that the company hates to lose.

More on Apple: Apple's AI-Powered Siri Is Such a Disaster That Employees Have Given the Team Developing It a Rude Nickname

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Zuckerberg Tells Court That Facebook Is No Longer About Connecting With Friends

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In a federal antitrust testimony, Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook's mission of connecting users is no longer a priority.

As times change, so do mission statements, especially in the fast-and-loose world of tech. In recent months, we've seen Google walk back its pledge to "do no evil," and OpenAI quietly delete a policy prohibiting its software's use for "military technology."

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is no exception. Its 2008 motto, "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life," is now a distant memory — according to Zuckerberg himself, who testified this week that Facebook's main purpose "wasn't really to connect with friends anymore."

"The friend part has gone down quite a bit," Zuckerberg said, according to Business Insider.

Instead, he says that the platform has evolved away from that model — its original claim to fame, as old heads will recall — in its over 20 years of life, becoming "more of a broad discovery and entertainment space," which is apparently exec-speak for "endless feed of AI slop."

The tech bigwig was speaking as a witness at a federal antitrust case launched by the Federal Trade Commission against Meta, the now-parent company to WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, and Oculus.

The FTC's case hinges on a series of messages sent by Zuckerberg and his executives regarding a strategy of buying other social media platforms outright, rather than compete with them in the free and open market — a scheme that's more the rule than the exception for Silicon Valley whales like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

The FTC alleges that Meta began its monopolistic streak as early as 2008, when Zuckerberg buzzed that "it's better to buy than compete" in a series of emails about then-rival platform Instagram. He finally got its hands on Instagram in 2012, after sending a memo that Facebook — which changed its name to Meta in 2021 — "had" to buy the photo-sharing app for $1 billion, fearing competition and a bidding war with fast-growing platforms like Twitter.

"The businesses are nascent but the networks are established," Zuckerberg wrote in a leaked email about startup platforms Instagram and Path. "The brands are already meaningful and if they grow to a large scale they could be very disruptive to us."

"It’s an email written by someone who recognized Instagram as a threat and was forced to sacrifice a billion dollars because Meta could not meet that threat through competition,” said the FTC’s lead counselor, Daniel Matheson.

Those internal memos are now smoking guns in what could be the biggest antitrust case since the infamous AT&T breakup of 1982, which had many similarities to the FTC's suit against Meta. Back then, AT&T held unrivaled market influence that it used to box out smaller fish and shape laws to its whims — to chase profit above all, in other words.

Meta, in parallel, has spent millions lobbying lawmakers, is the dominant player in online advertising, and currently wields a market cap of $1.34 trillion — higher than the value of all publicly traded companies in South Korea, for perspective.

The FTC's challenge will depend on whether federal prosecutors can convince US District Judge James Boasberg that Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal by notoriously weak US antitrust standards. They'll have no help from Boasberg, an Obama appointee, who has voiced skepticism with cases against Meta in the past.

"The [FTC] faces hard questions about whether its claims can hold up in the crucible of trial," Boasberg said in late 2024, adding that "its positions at times strain this country’s creaking antitrust precedents to their limits."

Whatever happens, it's clear that Zuckerberg has moved on from the idealism of the early internet — to the sloppified money-grubbing of whatever it is we have now.

More on Meta: Facebook Is Desperately Trying to Keep You From Learning What's in This Book

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Called Out for AI Slop, Andrew Cuomo Blames One-Armed Man

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Looking for a patsy, ex-New York governor and current NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo found one in his one-armed aide.

Looking for a patsy, ex-New York governor and current NYC mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo found one: a one-armed man.

As the New York Times reports, the aide in question, longtime Cuomo adviser Paul Francis, admitted to using ChatGPT to craft the disgraced former governor's new, typo-riddled housing policy plan.

"It’s very hard to type with one hand," Francis, who had his left arm amputated in 2012 following a sudden illness, told the NYT. "So I dictate, and what happens when you dictate is that sometimes things get garbled. And try as I might to see them when I proofread, sometimes they get by me."

The "things" that "got by" the career wonk include, but are not limited to, a headline with the term "objectively" misspelled as "Bbjectively," the mask-off claim that rent control is "symbolic," and a link to a 2024 Gothamist article that cited ChatGPT as the sourced used to pull it up.

Though the 29-page policy document has since been updated to remove its more glaring mistakes, an archived version of the original thing shows the embarrassing errors in all their glory.

The excuse also doesn't quite add up. There's nothing wrong with using dictation software, but why would that cause blatant spelling errors or a reference to ChatGPT? And why wasn't someone else reviewing the document before pushing it out? All told, it sounds a lot like a fictional explanation crafted by a political campaign to deter critics by throwing a man with a disability under the bus.

Prior to Francis' admission in the NYT, the Cuomo campaign went back and forth with local news website Hell Gate as to whether ChatGPT was used to write the document.

After an initial non-denial from spokesperson Rich Azzopardi that thanked the outlet for "pointing out the grammar" errors, followed up with a longer explanation about the use of voice recognition software, and then claimed that the person who wrote the policy paper insisted they didn't use AI to write it.

In a statement to Hell Gate, housing advocate Cea Weaver used the ChatGPT-generated errors to clown on the scandalous ex-governor.

"[Cuomo's] campaign is so out of touch that he is outsourcing housing policy to a robot," Weaver, the director of the New York State Tenant Bloc, told the site. "But New Yorkers don't need ChatGPT to tell us that we need a rent freeze — it's 'bbjective.'"

Obviously, this is far from the first time a politician has been caught using AI — and with the way things are going, it certainly won't be the last.

More on inapproprite AI uses: Judge Goes Ballistic When Man Shows AI-Generated Video in Court

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Huge Number of People Who Used to Like Elon Musk Now Detest Him, Polling Shows

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American statistician Nate Silver has found that billionaire Elon Musk's popularity has fallen off a cliff.

Billionaire Elon Musk's popularity has fallen off a cliff — a particularly precipitous decline, because he used to be immensely popular before squandering it.

According to the latest polling averages aggregated by statistician Nate Silver, the richest man in the world's favorability is in free-fall, with a mere 39.4 percent of Americans seeing Musk positively, while a majority of 52.7 percent see him negatively.

In total, that's a net favorability of -11 points — a significant drop since Donald Trump took office at the beginning of the year, when it stood at -3 points, and a stomach-churning plunge from 2016, when his favorability was a glowing +29.

We just launched an Elon Musk popularity tracker to accompany our Trump approval tracker.

Currently, he's at a ?14 as compared with Trump's ?5. pic.twitter.com/X4IIvLIhmk

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 11, 2025

The latest numbers highlight an astonishing degree of disillusionment with Musk's indiscriminate and sloppy slashing of government budgets with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. His embrace of far-right extremist views has also proven extremely polarizing, with the billionaire going as far as to perform two Nazi salutes during Trump's post-inauguration celebration.

Anti-Musk sentiment has risen considerably since then, inspiring an entire movement, called Tesla Takedown, which has seen thousands of people peacefully demonstrating in front of the EV maker's dealerships.

The carmaker has seen its sales plummet as a result across the globe. Many investors have also grown fed up with Musk's antics and refusal to fully commit his time to the company.

How much longer Musk will continue to gut the government remains to be seen. Trump recently suggested he could be out in the coming months.

Experts have since speculated that Musk's unpopularity could be a political liability for the president, who's battling issues with his own favorability. Trump's ratings have dipped this month, following a disastrous rollout of global tariffs.

"Although Musk may eventually leave the government, he’ll remain an exceptionally important and controversial public figure even if he does," Silver wrote. "Until then, he could be a liability for Trump because he’s less popular than the president is even as Trump’s numbers have also declined."

The cracks are already starting to show. After Musk threw $25 million behind Republican judge Brad Schimel, who ran against liberal candidate judge Susan Crawford during a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this month, Crawford beat Schimel handily.

It was a resounding defeat for Musk, who went as far as to hand out $1 million checks to voters in a desperate bid to sway election results.

Could his backfiring political efforts be a sign of what's still to come? Given that he's widely expected to leave his post at DOGE — while potentially falling comically far short of his initial goal of excising $2 trillion from the government budget — it remains to be seen whether surging anti-Musk sentiment will die down again.

But now that Tesla's brand has been raked through the mud, it'll likely take some time for his favorability to recover.

More on Musk: When Elon Musk Hears About Lives He's Destroyed, He Reportedly Responds With Laugh-Cry Emojis

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Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster

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A camera meant to capture photos of the Loch Ness monster has been recovered in the famed Scottish lake after 55 years.

In 1970, a cryptid-obsessed biologist placed several cameras inside plastic trap boxes and sent them down to the depths of Scotland's Loch Ness in hopes of finally capturing compelling evidence of its storied monster — and now, it appears that one of those cameras has been recovered by sheer accident.

As USA Today and other outlets report, one of the cameras deployed by University of Chicago biologist Roy Mackal some 55 years ago was discovered during a test dive of an unmanned research submersible in the famed lake in the Scottish Highlands.

Specifically, the camera trap's mooring system appeared to have gotten tangled up in the propellers for the submersible, which was named, much to the chagrin of the British government, "Boaty McBoatface" by the public in a viral poll in 2016.

Full of sensitive oceanographic instruments meant to study Loch Ness' unique marine climate — it sits atop the British Isles' most prominent tectonic fault, after all — and the world beyond it, Boaty McBoatface's job description almost certainly doesn't include searching for monsters.

All the same, the researchers who work with the submersible, known affectionately as Boaty, were pleased with their discovery.

"While this wasn't a find we expected to make," Sam Smith, a robotics engineer with the UK's National Oceanography Centre, said in a press statement, "we're happy that this piece of Nessie hunting history can be shared and perhaps at least the mystery of who left it in the loch can be solved."

It seems that Smith and his team weren't quite aware of what they had their hands on when they pulled the aged but remarkably well-preserved Instamatic camera out of its thick plastic cylinder. With help from naturalist Adrian Shine — a researcher who's been studying Loch Ness for more than half a century himself — they were able to identify the famed UChicago cryptozoologist's camera.

"It was an ingenious camera trap consisting of a clockwork Instamatic camera with an inbuilt flash cube, enabling four pictures to be taken when a bait line was taken," Shine said in his own press statement. "It is remarkable that the housing has kept the camera dry for the past 55 years, lying more than [426 feet] deep in Loch Ness."

When researchers developed the Instamatic's film, they unfortunately didn't find any photos of Nessie, though they did recover some beautiful, eerie photos of the deep, dark lake.

A camera dropped in Loch Ness in the 1970s has been found and the film developed

The two pictures on the BBC website are the purest distillation of my biggest fears. There is of course no monster, there is only cold, deep, dark water and a layer of dead things. pic.twitter.com/LPSGgnu05u

— Monkey Bones? (@iratesheep) March 31, 2025

The government researchers subsequently turned the camera and film over to the Loch Ness Centre in the loch-straddling village of Drumnadrochit (Mackal himself passed away in 2013, meaning the camera couldn't be returned.) According to Nagina Ishaq, the center's general manager, the find provides another piece of the puzzle in the history of the "elusive beast."

"We are guardians of this unique story and, as well as investing in creating an unforgettable experience for visitors, we are committed to helping continue the search and unveil the mysteries that lie underneath the waters of the famous Loch," Ishaq said, per USA Today.

Indeed, it's lovely to hear of something good happening with a submersible for a change — and to know that there are people still out there searching for monsters in the deep.

More on marine beasts: It Turns Out Sharks Make Noises, and Here's What They Sound Like

The post Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster appeared first on Futurism.

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Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster

Tinder Deploys AI-Powered Singles That Automatically Shoot Down Your Rizzless Attempts at Flirtation

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Tinder has teamed up with OpenAI to bring an AI flirting game to the dating app — and it's somehow way more cringe than you could imagine.

Tinder has teamed up with OpenAI to bring an AI voice-activated flirting game to the dating app.

As the company revealed in a press release, the awkwardly-named "Game Game" uses OpenAI's voice mode and GPT-4o reasoning model to encourage users to roleplay various meet-cute scenarios and get points based on how good they are at flirting. (Tinder assured in that same press release that the voice data gleaned from the game wouldn't be used to train any new AI models.)

In an Instagram video, Spencer Rascoff, the Zillow cofounder who was recently appointed CEO of the Tinder-owning Match Group, demonstrated how the goofy game works. (The 49-year-old executive may have also revealed his own preferences in the video: the AI single he matched with, Mila, was listed as age 32.)

Upon "matching" with "Mila" — who, like the other AI Game Game participants, has a cartoonish avatar and an audibly robotic voice — Rascoff begins one of the most uncomfortable conversational exchanges we've ever had the displeasure of witnessing.

At one point during the contrived scenario meant to take place in a kitchen at a party, the Palantir alum tells the AI avatar that he's having a "great time at this cooking activity," and soon after informs her she's "spicy." It also doesn't help that the video itself keeps losing focus on Rascoff's phone screen and misspelling the name "Mila" in its captions.

In an interview with Fast Company, Tinder growth and product VP Hillary Paine seemed to suggest that the game's goofiness was intentional — and cited metrics from a 2023 company survey as evidence.

"Our Future of Dating report found that 64 percent of young singles are totally fine with a little cringe if it leads to a real connection," Paine detailed. "We didn’t want it to feel overly polished or intense. Instead, we leaned into humor, awkwardness, and low-pressure moments to help users practice flirting in a fun, playful, and judgment-free way."

After trying the Game Game out for ourselves, Futurism can definitely agree that it's not "overly polished," though perhaps not in the way Tinder's C-suite intended.

When this reporter opened the in-app game, they forgot, as many are wont to do, to turn off their Bluetooth speaker. As such, the AI single they matched with began talking in stereo — and then, seemingly, responding to its own audio as if it were a real person speaking back.

We've reached out to Tinder to ask about that seeming glitch, but it's still a pretty hilarious exploit for a game — and company — that's clearly attempting to garner engagement via a clunky and malfunctioning technology.

More on AI love: Woman Alarmed When Date Uses ChatGPT to Psychologically Profile Her

The post Tinder Deploys AI-Powered Singles That Automatically Shoot Down Your Rizzless Attempts at Flirtation appeared first on Futurism.

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Tinder Deploys AI-Powered Singles That Automatically Shoot Down Your Rizzless Attempts at Flirtation