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Astronauts Hear Strange Sounds Coming From Boeing’s Cursed Starliner

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Over the weekend, stranded NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore encountered strange sounds coming out of Boeing's much-maligned Starliner.

Strange Music

Over the weekend, stranded NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore heard bewildering sounds coming out of Boeing's much-maligned Starliner, which carried him to the space station for what was supposed to be an eight-day trip that's now got him stuck on the orbital outpost until next year after equipment failures on the shuttle.

"I’ve got a question about Starliner," he told mission control in Houston over the radio. "There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker... I don’t know what’s making it."

While NASA later confirmed that the source of the noise was mostly benign, it's more of the type of story that Boeing has definitely been hoping will go away.

Its spacecraft, which has been docked at the International Space Station since early June, has already been plagued with technical issues. Helium leaks affecting its propulsion systems forced NASA to reevaluate the mission, concluding last month that it wasn't safe enough for Wilmore and colleague Sunita Williams' return. Instead, to the chagrin of Boeing, they'll return on a future SpaceX trip.

While investigating the unusual situation, Wilmore held his microphone up to Starliner's speakers.

"Alright Butch, that one came through," Houston told Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."

"I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore radioed. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."

Bumps in the Night

The strange sounds, as shared by meteorologist Rob Dale, manifest as an ominous knocking noise.

Fortunately, unlike Boeing's trouble with Starliner's propulsion system, it doesn't sound like it was anything particularly serious this time — though the explanation does read as fairly amateurish on Boeing's part.

In a statement to Ars Technica on Monday, NASA said that the "feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner."

"The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback," the statement reads.

It's not the first time astronauts have encountered strange noises coming from their spacecraft. For instance, China's first astronaut Yang Liewei noticed strange sounds that sounded like "knocking an iron bucket with a wooden hammer" during his voyage in 2003. The noise later turned out to be decreasing air pressure triggering changes in the structure of the vessel.

Starliner is scheduled to make its return without Williams and Wilmore on board as early as Friday. The two astronauts are instead getting a ride from Boeing's competitor SpaceX in February — an unfortunate end to a disastrous first crewed test flight.

More on Starliner: Boeing Execs Yelled at NASA Leaders When They Didn't Get What They Wanted

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Huge Tesla Fan Says X Has Shadowbanned His Posts After He Complained About Defective Cybertruck

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It seems like it's finally dawning on Tesla fan Lamar MK that CEO Elon Musk wants nothing to do with him or his content.

It seems like it's finally dawning on Tesla devotee Lamar MK that CEO Elon Musk wants nothing to do with him or his content.

The fan has practically made the EV maker's Cybertruck his entire personality — despite getting absolutely screwed by the company several times now.

He's already received two subsequent Cybertrucks that turned out to be absolute lemons.

Now, he says the videos he's been uploading to Musk's echo chamber X-formerly-Twitter are getting suspiciously overlooked, suggesting his presence is being secretly downgraded behind the scenes.

"I post all my videos to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and they get decent amount of views," Lamar MK tweeted. "I post those same videos to X and they barely get 100 views, it’s like zero reach."

"Either nothing is wrong, or I’m just shadow-banned to have no reach on here," he wrote in a follow-up. "Elon Musk. Please fix this."

Lamar MK has a long track record of bouncing between gushing about his Tesla and complaining that the EV maker is refusing to help him when his truck breaks down.

The trucks Lamar MK has received so far have suffered from a charging cable that refused to disengage, sagging headliner trim, a barrage of red blinking error messages, and getting locked out.

Tesla has done the bare minimum in response, often leaving him stranded for weeks on end.

But even after being treated like dirt, Lamar MK has been adamant in his Tesla fandom.

Most recently, the fan claimed that the "Cybertruck represents the most significant innovation and technological advancement the world has seen since the introduction of the iPhone."

Needless to say, it's a harebrained assertion given all the failures he's experienced personally, nevermind the truck's growing reputation as a failure. In a matter of less than a year, the truck has already been recalled four times.

Now that it's dawned on him that Musk's social media platform likely doesn't give a damn about the content he's been posting, though, he's finally starting to ask some questions.

"Given this situation, I'm questioning the value of my premium subscription, as it doesn't seem to enhance the exposure of my posts," he wrote in a Sunday tweet, referring to the platform's $ 8-a-month subscription service. "My content performs well on other platforms, so the issue isn't the quality or appeal of my videos."

When somebody suggested that X-formerly-Twitter may be throttling accounts that paint Tesla in a bad light — or at least acknowledge the many issues plaguing the brand's vehicles — Lamar MK yet again bent over backward.

"I personally avoid calling people names out of respect, but at the same time, I'm actively promoting the Tesla and the Cybertruck, which honestly leaves me feeling a bit confused," he tweeted. "I guess they don’t like me, lol. Maybe I’m just too honest!"

Meanwhile, users on Reddit cringed at Lamar MK's naivete.

"This is getting embarrassing. He needs to move on," one user wrote, referring to Musk. "He’s not returning your texts dude, you’re nothing to him."

"Jesus, this is one clingy guy," another user wrote. "Just move on, dude."

More on Lamar MK: Tesla Megafan Receives Two Subsequent Cybertrucks That Completely Fail

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Police Searching for Teslas Near Crimes to Seize Their Camera Footage

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Police officers are scanning for Teslas that may have recorded nearby crimes on their external cameras.

Commandeering Cops

Police officers are scanning for Teslas that may have ambiently recorded nearby crimes on their external cameras — and even going as far as to attempt to tow the vehicles away to inspect the footage.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, a Canadian tourist almost had his Tesla confiscated by the Oakland Police Department because it may have witnessed a nearby homicide.

The incident highlights a troubling new trend in mass surveillance, with the EVs' "Sentry Mode" serving as a public-facing extension of law enforcement — whether Tesla owners want to be involved or not.

President of the Richmond Police Officers Association Ben Therriault told the Chronicle that officers usually attempt to ask for the owner's consent first, but sometimes resort to towing the vehicles anyway.

"I respectfully request that a warrant is authorized to seize this vehicle from the La Quinta Inn parking lot so this vehicle’s surveillance footage may be searched via an additional search warrant at a secure location," officer Kevin Godchaux wrote in his search warrant affidavit, as quoted by the newspaper.

In the Crosshairs

Unsurprisingly, civil rights groups are calling foul. Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Saira Hussain told the Chronicle that police using Teslas "as a resource" puts "third parties — people who are not involved at all — in the crosshairs of investigations."

According to Tesla, Sentry Mode is designed to act as an "intelligent vehicle security system that alerts you when it detects possible threats nearby" — and as it turns out, it's not just threats to the vehicle itself.

Police have made ample use of the footage recorded by Tesla cameras in their investigations, according to the Chronicle's reporting, from burglaries to homicides.

And they're willing to go a long way to obtain the footage. For instance, one fatal shooting led to an Oakland police officer obtaining a search warrant to tow three vehicles, including a Tesla Model X, according to the paper.

The trend raises some thorny ethical questions. Should drivers really be put into a position where their vehicles serve as witnesses to a crime? Are the EVs serving as a crutch for otherwise ineffective law enforcement?

It's a troubling reminder of the pervasiveness of mass surveillance tech — and police are willing to take full advantage.

More on Tesla: Huge Tesla Fan Says X Has Shadowbanned His Posts After He Complained About Defective Cybertruck

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NaNoWriMo Slammed for Saying That Opposition to AI-Generated Books Is Ableist

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NaNoWriMo, a nonprofit writing organization that hosts an annual novel write-a-thon, has released a strange new platform on AI.

NaNo Oh No

A nonprofit writing organization that hosts an annual month-long novel write-a-thon has released its new position on artificial intelligence — and writers are clowning on its incredibly goofy suggestions.

The National Novel Writing Month group, better known by the abbreviation "NaNoWriMo," has included in its "Community Matters" section a statement suggesting that criticisms of AI use in writing are classist and ableist.

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the position statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

If you're confused as to why a writer-led writing organization is issuing statements in favor of the technology that many are concerned will take creatives' jobs while plagiarizing their work, you're far from alone.

"Miss me by a wide margin with that ableist and privileged bullshit," one user wrote. "Other people’s work is NOT accessibility."

Hefty Resignations

Two New York Times bestselling authors who sat on NaNoWriMo's various boards took their criticisms even further.

"This is me DJO officially stepping down from your Writers Board and urging every writer I know to do the same," Daniel José Older, a young adult fiction author best known for his "Outlaw Saints" series, tweeted. "Never use my name in your promo again in fact never say my name at all and never email me again. Thanks!"

Fellow YA author Maureen Johnson followed suit, telling the group in a tweet that she too was stepping down from its Young Writers' Program because she "want[s] nothing to do with your organization from this point forward."

"I would also encourage writers to beware," she continued, "your work on their platform is almost certainly going to be used to train AI."

In an update to its AI statement, NaNoWriMo acknowledged that although there are "bad actors in the AI space who are doing harm to writers and who are acting unethically" and that "situational" abuses of the technology go against its purported "values," the organization still "find[s] the categorical condemnation for AI to be problematic."

"We also want to make clear that AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse," the statement continues.

This "hand-wavey" statement, as one user put it, will likely do little to assuage writers' concerns about this seeming endorsement issued under the banner of social justice — except, perhaps, make NaNoWriMo look all the more foolish.

More on AI "writing": Sleazy Company Buys Beloved Blog, Starts Publishing AI-Generated Slop Under the Names of Real Writers Who No Longer Work There

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Gold Nuggets Can Be Formed With Electricity, Scientists Claim

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Electric discharges underground cause gold atoms to accumulate, which eventually forms gold nuggets, the researchers suggest.

Spark of Gold

Electric currents in the Earth may be responsible for the formation of gold nuggets, new research suggests.

As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the theory could explain why large chunks of gold — sometimes weighing more than a hundred pounds — appear in quartz veins when there's seemingly little traces of the metal in the surrounding earth.

"The standard explanation is that gold precipitates from hot, water-rich fluids as they flow through cracks in the earth's crust. As these fluids cool or undergo chemical changes, gold separates out and becomes trapped in quartz veins," study lead author Chris Voisey, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, told Forbes. "While this theory is widely accepted, it doesn't fully explain the formation of large gold nuggets, especially considering that the concentration of gold in these fluids is extremely low."

Main Squeeze

The answer lies in the unremarkable but ubiquitous mineral that gold nuggets are found in: quartz.

Quartz crystals are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when put under mechanical stress, like getting squeezed. Being underground, they're potentially subjected to these forces from every direction.

The most formidable stress inducers, though, would be earthquakes, of which hundreds occur each day.

The researchers hypothesized that the regular application of such tectonic forces could generate electricity in quartz veins strong enough to pull gold out of the fluids in the earth's crust. Over time, this accumulates to form full-blown nuggets.

"Quartz is the only abundant piezoelectric mineral on Earth, and the cyclical nature of earthquake activity that drives orogenic gold deposit formation means that quartz crystals in veins will experience thousands of episodes of deviatoric stress," the researchers wrote in the study.

Pay Dirt

To test the theory, the researchers placed quartz crystals in a water solution containing dissolved gold, which they subjected to earthquake-like stresses. As they predicted, the quartz generated enough voltage that gold nanoparticles accumulated on top of the crystals.

"In essence, the quartz acts like a natural battery, with gold as the electrode, slowly accumulating more gold with each seismic event," Voisey told Forbes. "Our discovery provides a plausible explanation for the formation of large gold nuggets in quartz veins."

Other scientists in the field have been intrigued by these findings.

"The piezoelectric theory is interesting because it would help to further concentrate any nanoparticles, but also explain why early quartz veins in fault zones are typically barren: you need the quartz veins to be there before you can induce the piezoelectrical effect," Taija Torvela, a geologist at the Univeristy of Leeds, UK, who wasn't involved in the study, told The Guardian.

Taija suggests that understanding this effect could be used to target gold deposits — though to be practical, "we would need to know if there are any markers, detectable on Earth’s surface, that this process would leave behind."

More on current events: Scientists Say They've Detected a Strange Source of Electricity at the Bottom of the Ocean

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Suspected Russian Spy Whale Found Dead Under Mysterious Circumstances

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On Saturday,

RIP Hvaldimir

In 2019, a purported "Russian spy beluga" stole our hearts — and now, we must mourn its early demise.

The 2,000-pound sea creature, later dubbed Hvaldimir, was found by Norwegian fishermen with a camera mount harness that read "Equipment of St. Petersburg," resulting in intrigue and speculation.

Over the last five years, Hvaldimir has been the subject of several viral stories, from the time it retrieved a GoPro to playing fetch.

But over the weekend, the jolly beluga was found dead — and animal activists are in disagreement about how he died.

"It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of Hvaldimir’s passing," Norwegian non-profit Marine Mind, which has been tracking the whale's whereabouts, wrote in an Instagram post. "This morning, after receiving a sighting report from a local, our team arrived to find Hvaldimir floating peacefully in the water."

"It is not immediately clear what caused his death," he continued, and a "necropsy will be conducted to determine his early passing."

Suspicious Circumstances

The events surrounding the whale's death remain shrouded in mystery — which is only fitting considering his much-debated "Russian spy" past.

Hvaldimir was estimated to be around 14 to 15 years old, only roughly half of the average lifespan of a beluga whale.

Last year, marine science student and whale tracker Emma Luck noted that Hvaldimir's appearance had changed dramatically, tweeting that "you can see how much weight he has lost."

In May of last year, scientists raised concerns that the whale was possibly not eating enough fish.

While Marine Mind founder Sebastian Strand told AFP that there were no signs of visible injuries, nonprofit One Whale founder Regina Raug referred to "holes pouring with blood from his body" in an Instagram video.

"We got to visit Hvaldimir today ourselves and see him and say goodbye, and there was no question that he was dying from something very unnatural and heartbreaking," she said.

Fortunately, we'll hopefully soon hear more.

"The autopsy is conducted by the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, and the conclusion will be public in two or three weeks," the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries told People in a statement.

Speculation aside, it's an unfortunate end to a much-beloved creature.

"Over the past five years, he touched the lives of tens of thousands, bringing people together in awe of the wonders of nature," Marine Mind wrote in its Instagram post. "Rest in peace, Hvaldimir. You will be deeply missed, but never forgotten."

More on Hvaldimir: The Suspected Russian Spy Whale Isn't Looking So Good

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Trump Posts AI-Generated Image of Kamala Harris as Joseph Stalin, But Instead It Just Looks Like Mario

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Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris designed to invoke Joseph Stalin — but she actually looked much more like Mario.

MAGA's AI onslaught continues.

This weekend, doubling down on accusations that presidential contender Kamala Harris is a Marxist communist (she isn't), former president Donald Trump took to Truth Social to boost a clearly AI-generated image of Harris donned in communist attire, Stalinesque mustache and all.

It wasn't the first time that Trump has used AI to attack Harris. Last month, days after falsely accusing his rival of using AI to fake the appearance of large crowds greeting her at a campaign stop — and, in the process, arguing that a presidential candidate using AI to create fake images should warrant disqualification on "election interference" grounds — Trump posted an AI-drawn image of a red-clad Harris speaking to a herd of Soviet-like figures, a hammer-and-sickle flag waving overhead.

It is, however, the first time he's boosted propaganda that makes his opponent look like the iconic Nintendo character Mario. Here we go!

The image was taken from a Substack post by a writer who works at the Gateway Pundit, a far-right digital publisher notorious for publishing stories promoting baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (copious evidence, and many judges he appointed, have found those claims to be false.) Trump reposted the image and a link to the Substack post — which described Harris as a "rock-ribbed socialist" — without comment.

The image is ridiculous, of course. It doesn't look at all real, and as netizens pointed out on social media, the fake Harris' fictional stache moreso invokes the vibe of Nintendo's beloved cartoon plumber than it does the feared Soviet dictator.

"The only thing this post makes me wanna do is vote for Kamala," wrote one X user, "and then play Super Mario World on my old Super Nintendo system."

"BREAKING," added comedian Jason Selvig, "Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of being a heroic plumber who saved Princess Peach from Bowser and his evil Koopa army."

Convincing or not, though, the image does highlight the reality that generative AI — particularly Elon Musk's guardrail-free Grok model — is increasingly being used as an easy-bake propaganda oven. After all, not all image-based propaganda is expressly designed to look real. It's often cartoonish and exaggerated by nature, and in this case, doesn't exactly look like something intended to sway staunchly blue voters from Harris' camp. Rather, this sort of propagandized image, while supporting a broader Trumpworld effort to portray Harris as a far-left extremist, reads much more like a deeply partisan appeal to the online MAGA base.

To wit, though many self-avowed Harris voters mocked the fake picture, the likes of right-wing X poster Phillip "Catturd" Buchanan latched onto it — as did his followers, who responded with quips about "Comrade Kamala" and, in several cases, AI-generated images of their own.

Trump wasn't the only far-right figure to employ AI this weekend to further communist allegations against Harris. On Monday, in response to an X post from the Harris campaign that referenced Trump's vow to be dictator on "day one" of his second term, X owner Musk used the platform he bought in 2022 to share his own AI image of Harris decked out in communist garb.

"Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one," Musk sarcastically captioned the image. "Can you believe she wears that outfit!?" The post has yet to receive a Community Note indicating the use of AI, and is also lacking a fact-check to the false allegation that Harris has vowed to be a "communist dictator on day one" (she hasn't.)

Musk's clearly faked photo drew criticism from users across X, ranging from "Happy Days" actor Henry Winkler to former United Nations deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson.

"Just straight up disinformation, with no parody label or community note, from the owner of this site and the guy with the most followers," wrote Zeteo editor-in-chief and former MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan. "Anyone who claimed he wouldn't use this platform to push rightwing conspiracies and help elect Trump must be feeling pretty dumb right now."

The use of AI by Trump — not to mention his richest and most influential supporter — to further highly politicized attack lines reflects the ever-increasing surreality of the 2024 election, a political contest being battled out on the back of a nearly-ten-year stretch of chaos, fake news, and the endless whir of muddied social media information. It also certainly underscores a recent argument made by The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, who observed that the "meme-loving" MAGA aesthetic and the hyperreal tone of AI slop are, in the murky annals of social platforms like X, increasingly merging together.

On that note, like Trump's Truth Social-boosted Lenin-slash-Mario image, Musk's X post drew some support in addition to derision.

"I can believe it," wrote one X user in the billionaire's comments. "Kammunism."

More on Trump and AI: After Falsely Accusing Kamala Harris of Using AI, Donald Trump Posts AI Slop About Her on Twitter

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Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees

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A series of blind assessments found that human-written summaries scored significantly better than summaries generated by AI.

Sums It Up

Generative AI is absolutely terrible at summarizing information compared to humans, according to the findings of a trial for the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) spotted by Australian outlet Crikey.

The trial, conducted by Amazon Web Services, was commissioned by the government regulator as a proof of concept for generative AI's capabilities, and in particular its potential to be used in business settings.

That potential, the trial found, is not looking promising.

In a series of blind assessments, the generative AI summaries of real government documents scored a dire 47 percent on aggregate based on the trial's rubric, and were decisively outdone by the human-made summaries, which scored 81 percent.

The findings echo a common theme in reckonings with the current spate of generative AI technology: not only are AI models a poor replacement for human workers, but their awful reliability means it's unclear if they'll have any practical use in the workplace for the majority of organizations.

Signature Shoddiness

The assessment used Meta's open source Llama2-70B, which isn't the newest model out there, but with up to 70 billion parameters, it's certainly a capable one.

The AI model was instructed to summarize documents submitted to a parliamentary inquiry, and specifically to focus on what was related to ASIC, such as where the organization was mentioned, and to include references and page numbers. Alongside the AI, human employees at ASIC were asked to write summaries of their own.

Then five evaluators were asked to assess the human and the AI-generated summaries after reading the original documents. These were done blindly — the summaries were simply labeled A and B — and scorers had no clue that AI was involved at all.

Or at least, they weren't supposed to. At the end, when the assessors had finished up and were told about the true nature of the experiment, three said that they suspected they were looking at AI outputs, which is pretty damning on its own.

Sucks On All Counts

All in all, the AI performed lower on all criteria compared to the human summaries, the report said.

Strike one: the AI model was flat-out incapable of providing the page numbers of where it got its information.

That's something the report notes can be fixed with some tinkering with the AI model. But a more fundamental issue was that it regularly failed to pick up on nuance or context, and often made baffling choices about what to emphasize or highlight.

Beyond that, the AI summaries tended to include irrelevant and redundant information and were generally "waffly" and "wordy."

The upshot: these AI summaries were so bad that the assessors agreed that using them could require more work down the line, because of the amount of fact-checking they require. If that's the case, then the purported upsides of using the technology — cost-cutting and time-saving — are seriously called into question.

More on AI: NaNoWriMo Slammed for Saying That Opposition to AI-Generated Books Is Ableist

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After Years of Chasing Money, OpenAI Reportedly Giving Up on Being a “Nonprofit”

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The Financial Times reports that OpenAI is looking to shed its non-profit status once and for all after years of being

ClosedAI

ChatGPT maker OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, only to change its mind four years later, announcing that it had become a "capped-profit" company.

Billions of dollars worth of investment rounds later, the Financial Times is now reporting that the company is finally looking to shed its nonprofit status once and for all.

The company is reportedly in talks to raise further new funds, giving it a valuation of north of $100 billion and potentially making it one of the most valuable Silicon Valley firms ever.

OpenAI has since denied the reporting, arguing in a statement to the FT that "the nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist."

"We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone and as we’ve previously shared we’re working with our board to ensure that we’re best positioned to succeed in our mission," the statement reads.

No Cap

OpenAI founder and multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk, who rage quit the firm in 2019, has long accused it of turning a blind eye to its nonprofit origins.

Last month Musk even sued OpenAI, arguing that it had abandoned its mission to "benefit humanity" by signing a $10 billion deal with tech giant Microsoft (a previous and largely identical lawsuit filed by Musk was mysteriously abandoned in June.)

"Either turning a nonprofit into a for-profit is legal and everyone should be doing it or it’s illegal and OpenAI is a house of cards," Musk tweeted last week.

Ironically, emails published by OpenAI at the time of Musk's first lawsuit showed that he had been the one pushing OpenAI to become a for-profit entity, suggesting he was simply sour for having abandoned a massively profitable AI venture years too early.

According to the FT's latest report, OpenAI has yet to make a final decision. One option is to remove existing caps on profits for investors, which would be a nail in the coffin for its nonprofit past.

None of this should be particularly surprising at this point, considering the Sam Altman-led entity has quickly turned into one of the most hyper-capitalist ventures in recent history.

Besides, its existing "capped profit" structure clearly hasn't stopped it from raising ungodly amounts of cash — and any public benefit to the project remains elusive.

More on OpenAI: Chef Admits His Smash Hit Pizza Was Invented by ChatGPT

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A Large Piece Is Missing From the Titanic, Sub Finds

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A large piece of the Titanic has, per new footage from a recent robotic expedition, fallen off as the more than 110-year-old ship decays.

Just Dropped

A large piece of the Titanic has, per new footage from a recent robotic expedition, fallen off as the wreckage of the more than 110-year-old ship decays in the deep.

In a statement about the new expedition, the shipping company RMS Titanic Inc has announced that during its latest voyage to the ship's ruins in the North Atlantic Ocean, its two submersibles — which thankfully had no humans aboard — discovered that a large portion of the ship's iconic bow railing was missing.

Memorialized by the "King of the World" scene in James Cameron's 1997 epic "Titanic" starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the missing piece of the ship's railing was subsequently found directly below the wreckage site on the ocean floor.

"We are saddened by this loss and the inevitable decay of the Ship and the debris," the company, which controls the rights to the famous ship's wreckage and salvage, said in its statement.

The latest scans and images of #TITANIC reveal many changes to the wrecksite and provide insight into how the great liner is deteriorating. A notable change is the loss of a 15-foot section of railing from the port side bow. pic.twitter.com/HxbLQ2S5R8

— RMS Titanic, Inc. (@RMSTitanic_Inc) September 2, 2024

Dirty Diana

Though the loss of the famous railing is indeed tragic, RMS Titanic noted on its website that among the new revelations from its summer 2024 expedition was the rediscovery of the "Diana of Versailles," a once-missing statuette.

Standing just two feet tall, the demure recreation of the original Louvre statue previously adorned the ship's first-class lounge, which was veritably "torn open," as the company puts it, when the ship sank after hitting that notorious iceberg.

You’ve seen the latest images and re-discovery of the elusive “Diana of Versailles” statuette made by #RMST on #TITANICExpedition2024. Now, let’s look at who she is. ?

Thank you to João Gonçalves for providing the image of the RMS OLYMPIC First Class Lounge. pic.twitter.com/81iB1LyDQw

— RMS Titanic, Inc. (@RMSTitanic_Inc) September 3, 2024

Though "Diana" was photographed once in 1986 during a secretive dive that wasn't revealed to the public until last year, the "TITANIC: HONOR AND GLORY" project that aims to release a complete 3D recreation walkthrough of the ship spotted part of it while sifting through old footage. When RMST's camera-equipped robot divers went down to check out the status of the wreckage, they discovered that it was indeed the missing statuette.

In sum, RMST said that its uncrewed submersibles captured more than two million photos of the wreckage and its otherworldly decay.

"Although Titanic’s collapse is inevitable," the company notes, "this evidence strengthens our mission to preserve and document what we can before it is too late."

More on sea-bound disasters: The Name of the Superyacht That Killed That Billionaire Will Make You Facepalm So Hard

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Elderly Woman Never Realized Her Doorstop Was Worth More Than a Million Dollars

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An elderly woman in Romania was using a seven-pound rock as a doorstop for decades — which turned out to be a $1 million amber nugget.

Amber Unheard

An elderly woman in Romania was using a seven-pound rock as a doorstop for decades — which later turned out to be one of the largest known amber nuggets in the world.

As Spanish newspaper El País reports, the stone is being valued at around $1.1 million, making it an exceptionally opulent way to hold open a door. Ironically, the extremely rare find was also ignored by thieves who broke into her home to steal her jewels.

The woman, who died in 1991, found the rock in a nearby river near the southeastern town of Colti. Eventually, one of her relatives, who inherited the rock, suspected it may be worth something, selling it to the Romanian state. Authorities at the Museum of History in Krakow, Poland, later confirmed it as being an extremely rare amber stone, estimated to be anywhere between 38.5 and 70 million years old.

"Its discovery represents a great significance both at a scientific level and at a museum level," Daniel Costache, director of the Provincial Museum of Buzau, which is currently in possession of the rock, told El País.

Family Stone

Amber, the fossilized remains of tree resin, has been seen as highly valuable since the Neolithic times. Despite its association with the color "amber," the gem can take on different colors, depending on the substances trapped within it.

The stones are also known to trap insects or other smaller animals within them millions of years ago, making them valuable artifacts of paleontological value.

The amber associated with the Buzau region of Romania tends to range in color from red to black. Since the 1920s, people have been mining amber in the region, with previous findings containing fascinating artifacts, from bird feathers and arachnids to reptiles, according to El País.

In short, in case you live near the town of Colti, you should have a closer look at your doorstop — it may just hold some incredible treasures.

More on precious gemstones: NASA Discovers Precious Gemstones on Mars

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Ozempic Actually Delays Aging, Scientist Claims

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A series of new studies showed that taking Ozempic reduced death rates from all causes, which may be a sign that it combats aging.

There's a lot of talk about the diabetes and weight loss drug semaglutide — sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy — being a "miracle" drug, as researchers keep finding health benefits that exceed its originally intended capabilities.

Now, a series of new studies show that people who took semaglutide died at a lower rate from all causes — which, some scientists are now suggesting, could be a sign that the drug actually combats aging itself.

"Semaglutide has far-reaching benefits beyond what we initially imagined," Harlan Krumholz of the Yale School of Medicine said Friday at the European Society of Cardiology Conference 2024, as quoted by the BBC. "It's not just avoiding heart attacks. These are health promoters. It wouldn't surprise me that improving people's health this way actually slows down the aging process."

The studies were conducted as part of the Select trial in the US, which in all followed more than 17,600 people, 45 years of age and older, who were obese or overweight and had cardiovascular disease, but did not have diabetes. Over the course of more than three years, each of these subjects were given semaglutide or a placebo.

The results were stark. The patients who took semaglutide died at a 19 percent lower rate from all causes compared to the placebo group, the studies found, including from infections and cardiovascular issues. Deaths from COVID-19, for example, were reduced by 33 percent.

Semaglutide is a GLP-1 agonist, meaning it mimics the GLP-1 hormone that manages your body's production of insulin. This means that it's effective at managing blood sugar levels, but because the hormone affects your brain's perception of satiety, it can also be used to suppress your appetite and change the way your body processes food.

The drug has blown up as a weight loss treatment, but simultaneously garnered a reputation for treating a host of ailments beyond its officially prescribed uses. Some patients have found themselves cured of their drinking and smoking habits. Meanwhile, studies have linked semaglutide with a lower risk of dementia and have shown that it can halt diabetic kidney disease. It's also been approved to lower the risk of heart disease.

These latest studies further reify the drug's versatility and far-reaching impacts.

"The robust reduction in non-cardiovascular death, and particularly infections deaths, was surprising," Benjamin Scirica, lead author of one of the Select studies, told The Guardian. "These findings reinforce that overweight and obesity increases the risk of death due to many etiologies which can be modified with therapies like semaglutide."

To be sure, some of the glowing press around Ozempic can be a little breathless, and some studies have suggested troubling side effects, such as a potential link to suicidal ideation. But these are tenuous or disputed — and so far, most of the evidence seems to suggest that semaglutide is delivering on its hype.

More on Ozempic: New Study Finds Wegovy Reduces COVID Death Risk By 33 Percent

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NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner’s Thrusters

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Later this week, Boeing's plagued Starliner is set to attempt its return journey from the International Space Station.

But instead of ferrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to the ground, it'll be undocking and reentering without any crew on board — after a software update, that is, because it was originally unable to fly without astronauts inside it.

Even before the ill-fated capsule launched in early June, engineers noticed several helium leaks. During Starliner's docking procedures, the leaks quickly turned into a real problem. The spacecraft missed its first attempt to dock with the space station.

Ever since, Boeing and NASA engineers have been struggling to identify the root cause of the problem.

At first, NASA remained adamant that it was simply a matter of routine procedure to investigate the mishap before imminently returning Wilmore and Williams on board Starliner. The agency repeatedly fought off reports that the two astronauts were "stranded" in space, arguing that engineers just needed a little more time to figure out the issue.

But it didn't take long for NASA to change its tune. While attempting to duplicate the issue at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, engineers eventually found what appeared to be the smoking gun, as SpaceNews' Jeff Foust details in a detailed new breakdown of the timeline.

A Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters, significantly constraining the flow of the oxidizer — a disturbing finding, because it greatly degraded the thrusters' performance.

Worse, without being able to perfectly replicate and analyze the issue in the near vacuum of space, engineers weren't entirely sure how the issue was actually playing out in orbit.

During a late August press conference announcing its decision to send Starliner back empty, NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich admitted that "there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters."

"People really want to understand the physics of what's going on relative to the physics of the Teflon, what's causing it to heat up and what's causing it to contract," he admitted. "That's really what the team is off trying to understand. I think the NASA community in general would like to understand a little bit more of the root cause."

While engineers found that the thrusters had returned to a more regular shape after being fired in space, they were worried that similar deformations might take place during prolonged de-orbit firings.

A lot was on the line. Without perfect control over the thrusters, NASA became worried that the spacecraft could careen out of control.

"For me, one of the really important factors is that we just don’t know how much we can use the thrusters on the way back home before we encounter a problem," NASA associate administrator for space operations Ken Bowersox said, as quoted by SpaceNews.

"If we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action," Stich said during last month's teleconference. "But when we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures with a crew on board... it was just too much risk."

That's a polite way of saying that NASA had very serious concerns. According to Faust's reporting, the saga evolved into "NASA’s biggest human spaceflight safety crisis since the shuttle Columbia accident more than two decades ago."

Earlier this week, NASA announced that Starliner's uncrewed undocking will take place as soon as Friday evening.

Wilmore and Williams will stay behind, presumably watching as their ride to space departs without them.

The two astronauts will have to be patient as their ersatz shuttle, SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, won't arrive until no sooner than September 24. Even then, the pair will have to wait until the Crew Dragon spacecraft returns to Earth in February, extending what was supposed to be an eight-day mission into an eight-month affair.

More on Starliner: Astronauts Hear Strange Sounds Coming From Boeing's Cursed Starliner

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NASA Will Attempt to Launch Boeing’s Troubled Starliner Away From Space Station as Fast as Possible, Just in Case

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NASA is looking to get Boeing's plagued Starliner away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't lose control.

Last month, NASA officially announced that Boeing's plagued Starliner is returning without a crew on board.

The decision, which came as a black eye to the embattled aerospace giant, means that stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will return to the surface on board SpaceX's Crew-9 mission in February instead.

Later this week, likely on Friday evening, the space agency will attempt to have the faulty spacecraft undock from the International Space Station autonomously and eventually reenter the atmosphere.

And it sounds like NASA will be playing it as safe as possible. With the helium leaks affecting Starliner's propulsion system, the agency is looking to get the capsule away from the space station as fast as possible to ensure that it doesn't careen out of control — or, in a worst case scenario hypothesized by experts, even crash into the station.

During a teleconference today, NASA officials laid out the plan. The agency has chosen to have Starliner perform a "breakout burn" which, according to NASA's Johnson Space Center lead flight director Anthony Vareha, is a "series of 12 burns, each not very large, about one Newton meter per second each."

"It's a quicker way away from Station, way less stress on the thrusters," added NASA commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

The original plan involved having the spacecraft perform a "dress rehearsal" for a "fly-around inspection" of the space station. That's something NASA is requiring both Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon to be able to perform before being certified, as part of its Commercial Crew program.

"The reason we chose doing this breakout burn is simply it gets the vehicle away from Station faster and, without the crew on board, able to take manual control if needed," Vareha explained. "There's just a lot less variables we need to account for when we do the breakout burn and allows us to get the vehicle on its trajectory home that much sooner."

During testing at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico earlier this summer, engineers discovered that a Teflon seal in a valve known as a "poppet" had expanded as it was being heated by the nearby thrusters. The seal was found to significantly constrain the flow of the oxidizer, greatly cutting into the thrusters' performance.

As a result, NASA is trying to be extremely light on the trigger button during its upcoming attempt to return Starliner.

When asked how confident he was in Starliner's ability to one day return to space, Stich appeared optimistic.

"We know that the thrusters work well when we don't command them in a manner that overheats them and gets the poppet to swell on the oxide," he explained. "We know that the thruster is a viable thruster, it's a good component," but the goal is to "not overheat it."

In other words, the space agency is far from giving up on Starliner, despite an extremely messy and potentially disastrous first crewed test flight.

NASA has openly discussed what it has learned from previous spaceflight disasters. During NASA's announcement that Starliner would come back empty last month, NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance Russ DeLoach went as far as to invoke the agency's fatal Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters in 1986 and 2003 respectively.

In short, Starliner's return to the ISS still appears to be on the table, no matter how far off such a mission may be at this point. That of course also depends on how successful NASA is in getting Starliner back on the ground.

The agency will be looking to "fill in some of the gaps we had in qualification," Stich said, adding that teams are already looking for ways to get Starliner "fully qualified in the future."

More on Starliner: NASA Engineers Were Disturbed by What Happened When They Tested Starliner's Thrusters

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Suspected Russian Spy Whale Was Reportedly Shot Multiple Times

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Animal rights groups are confident that

Whale of Bullets

Over the weekend, news emerged that believed "Russian spy" beluga whale Hvalidmir had died.

But perhaps fittingly — considering his mysterious past as a possible foreign agent — the circumstances surrounding his death sound increasingly bizarre.

Regina Haug, the founder of animal rights group One Whale, is saying the beluga died a violent death, and is suggesting foul play.

"He had multiple bullet wounds around his body," Haug claimed in an Instagram post.

The post was appended with photographs of what appear to be bullet wounds dotting Hvaldimir's corpse.

"The injuries on the whale are alarming and of a nature that cannot rule out a criminal act — it is shocking," said animal rights group Noah director Siri Martinsen in a statement. "Given the suspicion of a criminal act, it is crucial that the police are involved quickly."

Das Shoot

A separate organization called Marine Mind, which was tracking Hvaldimir's movements, took a different tack.

"There was nothing to immediately reveal the cause of death," director Sebastian Strand told Agence France-Presse. "We saw markings but it’s too early to say what they were."

Strand suggested that the markings may have been the result of marine birds.

The beluga whale was estimated to be only around 14 to 15 years old, roughly half of the average lifespan of its species.

The Norwegian Veterinary Institute is now conducting an autopsy and will publicize its results in a matter of weeks.

Meanwhile, Noah and One Whale are adamant that Hvaldimir was shot and are "filing a police report to the Sandnes Police District and the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime," according to One Whale's Instagram post.

"I have been with Hvaldimir for the past five years and know him very well," said Haug in a statement. "When I saw his body, I immediately knew he had been killed by gunshots. I even saw a bullet lodged in his body."

"This kind, gentle animal was senselessly murdered," she added. "We will pursue justice for Hvaldimir and hope that someone comes forward with information about his killing."

More on the incident: Suspected Russian Spy Whale Found Dead Under Mysterious Circumstances

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The World Health Organization Just Declared a New Global Emergency

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For the second time in just over two years, the WHO has declared an outbreak of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, a global emergency. 

For the second time in just over two years, the World Health Organization has declared an outbreak of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, a global emergency.

As the New York Times and other outlets report, this second outbreak has already resulted in 14,000 cases and 524 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone.

Compared to the 100,000 people worldwide who contracted mpox and roughly 200 who died from it in 2022, this year's strain of the virus — which like its predecessor can cause lymph swelling, fever, respiratory symptoms, muscle aches, and rashes — is significantly more virulent.

Both in 2022 and this year, Congo's specific strains of mpox have been more severe, the NYT notes. In that country, however, this year's outbreak seems to be even worse, with a death rate of roughly three percent compared to the 0.2 percent death rate back in 2022.

Thus far, mpox has spread to 13 countries on the African continent, though as the Associated Press notes in its reporting, 96 percent of them are in the DRC.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a media briefing that the rapidity of spread this time around is concerning, especially because women and girls are now the most at-risk groups for contracting the primarily sex-spread disease that previously was mostly contained to gay and bisexual men.

"The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern DRC, its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying," Ghebreyesus.

The current strain of mpox was detected for the first time last year, the NYT notes, and was found to be equally occurrent in both men and women for the first time. It seems to have mutated, per genetic analyses, sometime in September to become more easily spread, and has done so in part due to heterosexual sex work.

Thus far, this strain has not yet been detected outside of Africa, and with the DRC approving two new mpox vaccines geared towards this outbreak earlier in the summer, epidemiologists are hoping it'll stay that way.

"This outbreak has been smoldering for quite a long time, and we continually have missed opportunities to shut it down," Nicole Lurie, the executive director of the vaccine-financing nonprofit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, explained in an interview with the NYT. "I’m really glad that everybody is now paying attention and focusing their efforts on this."

Indeed, given that the virus continued to spread to the point that it mutated to become more virulent and deadly, it seems clear that some opportunities to contain it must have been missed.

More on virulence: Deranged Politicians Are Trying to Ban Wearing Masks

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SpaceX Violated Environmental Rules by Dumping Toxic Wastewater, Regulators Find

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A Texas agency has spanked Elon Musk's SpaceX for dumping toxic pollution into the water around its sprawling Starbase launch site in Texas.

Dumping Sludge

A Texas agency has given Elon Musk's SpaceX a slap on the wrist for spewing toxic wastewater into the fragile ecosystem around its sprawling Starbase launch site, according to CNBC.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) accused SpaceX of "discharging deluge water" without their approval in early August, adding to a total of 14 complaints against the aerospace company for polluting the surrounding environment.

The notice could potentially delay SpaceX's ambitions of launching more than two dozen rockets annually at its Starbase facility in Boca Chica, in addition to any plans for space missions at Cape Canaveral, Florida (where SpaceX has also received environmental complaints).

SpaceX responded to the Texas notice and CNBC report in a lengthy post on the social media platform X-formerly-Twitter, saying that the company has been careful about any "excess water" not coming into contact with "local groundwater." This all comes amid the fact that SpaceX has actually been working alongside the TCEQ and the US Environmental Protection Agency on the subject of the violation notice, its water deluge system, which uses water to cool "the heat and vibration from the rocket engines firing."

"Throughout our ongoing coordination with both TCEQ and the EPA, we have explicitly asked if operation of the deluge system needed to stop and we were informed that operations could continue," SpaceX tweeted.

CNBC’s story on Starship’s launch operations in South Texas is factually inaccurate.

Starship’s water-cooled flame deflector system is critical equipment for SpaceX’s launch operations. It ensures flight safety and protects the launch site and surrounding area.

Also known as…

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 12, 2024

Captain Planet

Besides this latest violation, residents and environmentalists have already complained about the impact of rockets launched at the Boca Chica site, which is situated next to a beach where endangered sea turtles breed and a critical migratory bird habitat.

Rocket launches at the site have scorched the lands, blasted apart the nests of migratory birds, and rained rocket debris on fragile flora, but Musk, SpaceX CEO, has been able to successfully yield his influence within the Federal Aviation Administration while running roughshod over upset officials at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, according to a July report in The New York Times.

In Florida, Musk and SpaceX are already facing complaints about how the company may potentially launch more than 70 rockets at Cape Canaveral, with a whole array of disparate stakeholders — residents to commercial fishermen — upset at the impact of that unprecedented, high number of rocket launches in a single year.

Any complaint taken far enough could, theoretically, forestall these rocket launches. Though — given the sheer tonnage of financially and politically incentivized parties lined up behind Musk and SpaceX — it would likely take an advocacy effort as ahistorical as Musk's ambitions to slow them, if there's even one to be had.

More on SpaceX: Elon Musk Slammed for Filling Orbit With Space Junk

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Cybertruck Tailgates Are Deforming After Doing Regular Truck Stuff

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Cybertruck owners, beware of treating your Tesla truck like a truck. You might just bend the tailgate out of shape.

Truck Bed Elephant

The evidence keeps mounting that Tesla's plagued Cybertruck isn't very good at being a truck and doing average truck things.

As spotted by Jalopnik, a Cybertruck owner took to the Cybertruck Owners Club forum on Friday to lament that his vehicle's stainless steel tailgate was deformed. Why? Because he tried to use the tailgate to haul stuff. You know, run-of-the-mill truck activities.

"Warning to everyone about hauling items," read xhawk101's cautionary message. "I made sure that the weight limit was not exceeded, however, since the load shifted, it obviously put too much weight on the tailgate and now the tailgate is warped."

The Tesla owner added that the tailgate "fortunately still shuts," however the incident "clearly bent the stainless steel and it now has a gap."

The owner was hauling a load of 12-foot composite decking boards. On its website, Tesla brags that its vehicle can hold a payload of 2,500 pounds — or, as the webpage also notes "equivalent of an average African elephant" — and that its "ultra-hard stainless-steel exoskeleton helps to reduce dents, damage and long-term corrosion."

And yet, according to the owner, the truck was allegedly neither durable nor ultra-hard enough to withstand... a load of decking wood, highlighting once again that Tesla has been majorly overselling the brawniness of its unorthodox and highly unreliable pickup.

Bent Out of Shape

Instead of pointing the finger at Tesla's infamously shoddy workmanship, the owner is blaming himself.

"Perhaps I should have known," they wrote, "but alas I was unaware of the potential."

In a later comment, the Tesla owner conceded that boards "were as far in bed as possible until the truck accelerated" due to Tesla's traffic-aware cruise control.

"I'm pretty sure when it lurched forward it shifted the load," they confessed.

Still, we can't stress enough: these were composite decking boards, and these stainless steel monstrosities are supposed to be carrying around literal elephants.

Besides, there are plenty of situations in which a driver might need to manually speed up or slow down, and sometimes abruptly.

In short, it's reasonable to expect that a truck that can cost north of $100,000 and is allegedly "built for any planet" won't get deformed by some 12-foot deck planks and a slight shift in speed.

More on the Cybertruck: Tesla Fan Climbs on Cybertruck to Show How Tough It Is, Accidentally Cracks Windshield

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Disney Says Wrongful Death Suit Should Be Dropped Because Plaintiff Was a Disney+ Subscriber

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Disney's forced arbitration clause buried in its streaming service agreement is front-and-center in this wrongful death suit.

Wrongful Handling

Despite being repeatedly assured her food contained no peanuts, an NYU doctor died at a Disney resort — and now, her widower's wrongful death lawsuit is being challenged on a seemingly bogus technicality.

As Law & Crime reports, the wrongful death suit filed earlier this year by widower Jeffrey Piccolo in the wake of his late wife Kanokporn "Amy" Tangsuan's death at a Disney resort last October has been the subject of a tense back-and-forth between the grieving plaintiff and the defendant.

In its most recent forte, Disney claimed that Piccolo forfeited his right to sue the entertainment conglomerate when signing up for a free Disney+ subscription trial in 2019 and when using the company's app at its theme park a month prior to his wife's death.

In other words, the media giant is arguing that because he didn't read the fine print on his free Disney+ trial, Piccolo and his late wife's estate forfeited the right to sue.

Taking Offense

As the widower's attorneys suggested in their suit filed in a Florida circuit court, that assertion is pretty darn offensive.

Instead of letting a jury decide whether or not Tangsuan's allergic reaction death should net Piccolo damages, Disney said that the widower is beholden, per the Disney+ trial contract, to solve the issue in arbitration.

Otherwise known as "forced arbitration," this type of clause has been the subject of multiple congressional outlawing efforts of varying levels of success. Companies prefer to compel customers into arbitration because it's cheaper for them and allows them to choose the person making the ultimate calls.

It's arguably a sick way to handle such an emotionally charged case, and Piccolo's lawyers are fighting back.

Alarming Assertion

In this latest counter-filing, Piccolo and his attorneys are calling BS on the entire premise of Disney's argument.

"There is simply no reading of the Disney+ Subscriber Agreement, the only Agreement Mr. Piccolo allegedly assented to in creating his Disney+ account, which would support the notion that he was agreeing on behalf of his wife or her estate, to arbitrate injuries sustained by his wife," the suit posits. "Frankly, any such suggestion borders on the absurd."

It's worth noting that in its bid to get the suit thrown out, Disney's lawyers have contested the facts of the widower's lawsuit that was, as the New York Post notes, only seeking $50,000 in damages for his late wife's death.

That's a paltry sum to a megalith like Disney — but when it comes to controlling the narrative and arena, it seems like even this small fight is worth sending in its battleships.

More on curious lawsuits: Elon Musk's X Fighting Not to Give Up Information in Epstein Victim Case

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Former CEO Blames Working From Home for Google’s AI Struggles, Regrets It Immediately

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Billionaire ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is walking back his questionable claim that remote work is to blame for Google's AI failures.

Eyes Will Roll

Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is walking back his questionable claim that remote work is to blame for Google slipping behind OpenAI in Silicon Valley's ongoing AI race.

On Tuesday, Stanford University published a YouTube video of a recent talk that Schmidt gave at the university's School of Engineering. During that talk, when asked why Google was falling behind other AI firms, Schmidt declared that Google's AI failures stem from its decision to let its staffers enjoy remote work and, with it, a bit of "work-life balance."

"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," the ex-Googler told the classroom. "And the reason startups work is because people work like hell."

The comment understandably sparked criticism. After all, work-life balance is important, and Google isn't a startup.

And it didn't take long for Schmidt to eat his words.

"I misspoke about Google and their work hours," Schmidt told The Wall Street Journal in an emailed statement. "I regret my error."

In a Stanford talk posted today, Eric Schmidt says the reason why Google is losing to @OpenAI and other startups is because Google only has people coming in 1 day per week ? pic.twitter.com/XPxr3kdNaC

— Alex Kehr (@alexkehr) August 13, 2024

Ctrl Alt Delete

In the year 2024, Google is one of the most influential tech giants on the planet, and a federal judge in Washington DC ruled just last week that Google has monopoly power over the online search market. Its pockets are insanely deep, meaning that it can compete in the industry talent war and devote a ridiculous amount of resources to its AI efforts.

What it didn't do, though, was publicly release a chatbot before OpenAI did. OpenAI, which arguably isn't exactly a startup anymore either, was the first to wrench open that Pandora's box — and Google has been playing catch-up ever since.

So in other words, not sleeping on the floors of Google's lavish facilities isn't exactly the problem here.

In a Wednesday statement on X-formerly-Twitter, the Alphabet Workers Union declared in response to Schmidt's comments that "flexible work arrangements don't slow down our work."

"Understaffing, shifting priorities, constant layoffs, stagnant wages and lack of follow-through from management on projects," the statement continued, "these factors slow Google workers down every day."

Later on Wednesday, as reported by The Verge, Stanford removed the video of Schmidt's talk from YouTube upon the billionaire's request.

More on Google AI: Google's Demo of Its Latest AI Tech Was an Absolute Train Wreck

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