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When New York State banned phones in public schools bell-to-bell this September, Governor Hochul pitched it as a way to improve classroom focus. What nobody expected was the lunchroom renaissance. According to New York Magazine, teachers across the ...

Google.ai is a new front-end for Google's AI services. Currently, it's free, ad-free, and delivers uncluttered answers to questions. It won't work this well for long, though. It's destined for enshittification, but how soon? I asked Google.ai to give ...

Journalist Gil Duran's podcast "The Nerd Reich" does what tech journalism largely failed to do for two decades: treat Silicon Valley's libertarian ideology as a powerful and well-funded political movement rather than a quirky personality trait of ...

The Wall Street Journal let AI run a vending machine. It lost over $1,000 after reporters tricked it into giving everything away. Anthropic let its Claude AI run a vending machine in the Wall Street Journal newsroom for three weeks as an internal ...

ICE signed a $636,500 contract with AI Solutions 87, a company registered to a residential address in West Bend, Wisconsin, to provide AI-powered skip tracing for the agency's deportation operations. According to 404 Media, the company's website says ...

Paris Buttfield-Addison bought a $500 Apple gift card from a major retailer to pay for iCloud storage. The code failed. The store agreed to reissue it. Apparently, the card number had been compromised. Then Apple locked his entire account. Buttfield ...

Meta made over $3 billion last year from Chinese advertisers pushing scams, illegal gambling, and pornography--and when an internal team started making progress against the fraud, Mark Zuckerberg had them disbanded. According to Reuters, Meta's ...

In April 2022, artist Steph Maj Swanson asked an AI image generator to produce something as far from Marlon Brando as possible. After a couple of iterations, the system started generating the same woman over and over: an older figure with hollow eyes ...

The daily experience of using the internet has become measurably worse: more ads, more algorithmic manipulation, more walls between you and the things you actually want. Cory Doctorow, journalist, novelist, internet activist, and Boing Boing editor ...

In 1980, Isaac Asimov went on The David Letterman Show and predicted that computers would get smaller and simpler. He was right. Open Culture highlights the interview, where 60-year-old Asimov "proves himself a natural comedian" while 33-year-old ...