Everyone agrees we need to find ways to keep AIs from going "rogue," but we already can't plumb the depths of what these models are doing, and their "thinking" is getting even more opaque

It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark woods. Others had him hacked to pieces in New York City.

In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He had duped leading critics, wealthy collectors, and even a high-ranking Nazi official into believing his works were real.

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On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year beginning in February 2024. His return was met with an overwhelmingly effusive response.

The argument that repeated statements of concern about AI from multiple experts -- some of whom have quit their jobs over it -- is just marketing hype or regulatory capture appears increasingly deluded

Robert William Barker was an American media personality, game show host, and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS's The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. Barker also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975. Born in Darrington, Washington, in modest circumstances, Barker spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and was a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.

The argument that repeated statements of concern about AI from multiple experts -- some of whom have quit their jobs over it -- is just marketing hype or regulatory capture appears increasingly deluded

For the seventeenth year: Welcome to autumn, fuckheads.

More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish.

Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. Today, he still owns a dressage farm in Loxahatchee, Florida, twenty miles inland from Palm Beach. On five acres, he has a stucco house that’s connected to a barn; white-fenced paddocks shaded by palms; and an outdoor riding ring.

How good a golfer was Ted Rhodes? At the 1948 US Open, he finished the first round just three shots behind the leader – and eventual winner – Ben Hogan. But there’s more to the story: Rhodes was the first Black competitor in the tournament in its modern era, during a time of widespread segregation in American sport. In addition to reintegrating the US Open, Rhodes was part of a 1948 lawsuit against the PGA, which had restricted membership to white people.

I don’t like to agree with a Trump-related entity but the DoJ’s brief in the NYT-OpenAI case is correct on the facts IMO — indexing of content for AI training should be considered fair use, since it is clearly transformative

With an assist from A.I., President Trump offers a window into how he wants to be seen — and, critics say, a barometer of his mental state.

Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it.

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head.

Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field philosopher at the University of Sydney. He believes crows relate to people in ways that meet several conditions for friendship.

Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you'll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He's the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night's sleep over Hiroshima, the one whose life has been written up in a bestselling autobiography and a dozen documentaries.

The details of the AI agent swarm that implemented the Hugging Face hack have a number of disturbing implications about AI alignment and the abilities of rogue agents

At the Elmcroft of Lebanon, Tennessee, the staff of the memory-care unit knew the code to the keypad that controlled the exit door. Residents weren’t supposed to be able to leave unattended. That’s how the system worked: the keypad stood between those in the facility’s care and the risks outside of it. But on March 2, 2020, the system broke down—because one resident realized the keypad was giving the code away.

For years, Arthur Kermalvezen, the child of a sperm donor, saw possible fathers everywhere he went. "I imagined it might be my teacher, the people I saw on the bus... and I was very angry because it's impossible to live like this." When, as an adult, he fell in love with Audrey, another sperm donor baby from Paris, the question became even more pressing.

In July 1933, former Army General Smedley Butler was visited by a pair of gentlemen who had come to urge him to run for the office of National Commander of the American Legion, an influential organization of veterans. Though Butler declined the invitation, one of the men⁠— Gerald MacGuire⁠— made several subsequent visits during which he disclosed additional details. He claimed to represent…

The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of the world’s population, and above eighty per cent of the historic French are estimated to be carrying it right now.

I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlin...

I was already working on a piece for this week about the multiple state and federal lawsuits claiming that Facebook and Instagram harm teens, cause addiction and depression etc. when I saw the headlin...

I awoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in rural Connecticut. From what I could tell, as I frantically tried to piece together the night’s events, one of Joel’s friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger she’d met that week on Tinder: “Castle party Saturday!

A 400-year-old grave held the body of a young woman, the rusted blade of a sickle over her throat and a padlock fastened to her foot — the macabre signs of a community terrified the deceased would rise again. Archaeologists unearthed Zosia, as the skeleton was nicknamed, from an unmarked burial site in 2022 near the village of Pień in northern Poland.

Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93. Once called the “prettiest thing underwater,” Ms. Parry was among the first women to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, an achievement that led to a career in Hollywood, including doubling for Sophia Loren in the 1957 film “Boy on a Dolphin” and co-starring with Lloyd Bridges on the television show “Sea Hunt.”Above water, she participated in an LSD study conducted by Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist who administered doses of the psychedelic drug to more than 900 subjects in Los Angeles, many of them actors.

Most forms of measurement from times past – even some in common use today – are based on some part of the human body or some action a person may take. For example, the ‘inch’ was originally the width of the middle of the thumb across the knuckle. The ‘foot’ was just that – the length of an adult male foot, the ‘span’ was the full stretch of the hand from the tip of the little finger to the thumb (about nine inches) and the ‘yard’ was the length of the outstretched arm, from shoulder to fingertips, or on occasion, nose to fingertips.

He drove his red Mercedes along Pershing Avenue with the top down, his wavy brown hair just long enough to flap in the wind. With his monogrammed shirts and pleated pants, Michael Blatt exuded a specific 1980s California cool rooted in the certainty that, no matter what, he would never, ever lose. An Army brat, Blatt said he moved 18 times before coming to the University of the Pacific to play soccer in the mid-1960s. His ambition took root. By 21, he wanted to make a million dollars. By 24, he wanted $10 million.After graduating from UOP in 1968, he worked in finance, but Blatt would never settle for managing other people’s money.

When excavators explored (and emptied) King Tuntankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s, they found a lot of magnificent artifacts. The 5,398 officially noted burial objects included ceremonial figurines, chariots, pieces of jewelry and artwork, and even piles of food. Excavators also found King Tut’s underwear — more than 140 pairs of it. No one knows why King Tut was sent off to the afterlife with so many loincloths, let alone why he packed precisely this many for his journey. A closer look at Tut’s garments suggested his measurements were 31”, 29”, 43”—rather hippy for a young man.

AI-powered newsrooms like RuntimeWire raise a number of important questions, including: What are journalists for?

A boy’s scream can be heard in the distance on body camera footage released by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources showing how rescue teams last week found two women and a nine-year-old boy who had been stranded for three days when their river tubing trip went wrong. Sarah Vida, 28, and her son Kayden Kovalcik, 9, along with Jazmin Hock, 28; wearing just their swimming suits. Hock’s legs are almost entirely covered in deep, red cuts from scrapes after walking for days through the brush. They have a broken phone and a single water bottle with only a few sips left.

Thijs de Buck, an MRI physicist based in the Netherlands, recently built a speed and distance tracker for his hamster Mollie’s wheel, with the data automatically uploaded to Mollie's own Strava account. One recent activity showed 6.06 miles in 4 hours and 37 minutes. The next night, Mollie logged 5.55 miles in 3 hours and 56 minutes. At first, de Buck just wanted to know how much distance Mollie was covering after dark. “I bought a very cheap bicycle computer pretty much right away,” he told Runner’s World. But the sensor would shift into standby mode once Mollie stopped running for more than five minutes.

The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he'd been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco's brother and political rival, Cardinal Ferdinando de Medici, was the prime suspect, especially as Francesco's wife, Bianca Cappello, also died within a day of her husband. In a new study published in iScience, researchers from Yale University in the US and the University of Pisa in Italy have confirmed the real killer.

Is Substack a service for writers to reach readers, or is it a venture-capital backed startup that is scrambling to do whatever it can to justify its theoretical market value?

Is Substack a service for writers to reach readers, or is it a venture-capital backed startup that is scrambling to do whatever it can to justify its theoretical market value?

Before the summer of 1936, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers. Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and corsets, hats and gloves. But the summer of 1936 was too much. It was a summer when people perished because of their choice of clothing. In Yonkers, on June 21, two reporters from the New York Daily News — hoping to test the city's anti-shorts law — were arrested for wearing shorts.

On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the next three days, cameras around town filmed him leaving the hotel with a purple plastic bag of belongings and coming back without it, using the blind spots between cameras to dispose of whatever was inside. He bought eight 82-cent stamps and airmail stickers at the post office, and asked a taxi driver where to find a quiet beach for swimming. On June 15, he checked out, ate a toasted ham and cheese sandwich at the bus station while reading scraps of paper from his pocket, tore them up, dropped them in a bin, and took the 2:20 bus to Rosses Point.

It's likely that not many people care about this, but I am writing this on my WordPress.com blog — which I normally use as a backup to my blog at mathewingram.com/work — because the machine hosting that blog (and my photo server and my Plex instance and a bunch of other things) got hacked by ransomware a few days ago. I am currently in the process of either trying to restore it or wiping it and starting again, and at this point I have to say that the latter seems more likely.