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Category: Technology

Sudanese people who depend on Starlink don’t have the luxury of hating Elon Musk

Sudanese people who depend on Starlink don’t have the luxury of hating Elon Musk

Yassmin Abdel-Magied writes: Once upon a time, my dream was to work for Elon Musk. I was a young mechanical engineering graduate with hopes of inventing the machines of the future. Unlike other tech billionaires whose inventions existed in boring binary and flat 2D, Musk seemed like a man from a different era, a man after my own heart. He wanted to revolutionize the automobile, travel to space, shift earth and change the world, and he wanted to do it…

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AI isn’t smart. It cannot think, feel, or understand anything

AI isn’t smart. It cannot think, feel, or understand anything

Tyler Austin Harper writes: To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines. [Sam] Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5’s improved “emotional intelligence,” which he says makes users feel like they’re “talking to a…

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DOGE coder using AI in VA: ‘I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says’

DOGE coder using AI in VA: ‘I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says’

By Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky This story was originally published by ProPublica As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them. The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.” The code, using…

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Steve Bannon says he told Trump to investigate Musk as an ‘illegal alien’

Steve Bannon says he told Trump to investigate Musk as an ‘illegal alien’

The New York Times reports: Stephen K. Bannon, one of Elon Musk’s most vocal critics, said he was advising the president to cancel all of the tech billionaire’s contracts and launch several investigations into the world’s richest man. “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Mr. Bannon, the former top aide to President Trump who…

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Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web destroyed more than aircraft – it tore apart the old idea that bases far behind the front lines are safe

Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web destroyed more than aircraft – it tore apart the old idea that bases far behind the front lines are safe

A sitting duck? A Russian Tu-160 strategic bomber on the ground on Feb. 22, 2024. Alexander KazakovAFP via Getty Images By Benjamin Jensen, American University School of International Service A series of blasts at airbases deep inside Russia on June 1, 2025, came as a rude awakening to Moscow’s military strategists. The Ukrainian strike at the heart Russia’s strategic bombing capability could also upend the traditional rules of war: It provides smaller military a blueprint for countering a larger nation’s…

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Is AI sparking a cognitive revolution that will lead to mediocrity and conformity?

Is AI sparking a cognitive revolution that will lead to mediocrity and conformity?

The Industrial Revolution mechanized production. Today, there’s a similar risk with the automation of thought. kutaytanir/E+ via Getty Images By Wolfgang Messner, University of South Carolina Artificial Intelligence began as a quest to simulate the human brain. Is it now in the process of transforming the human brain’s role in daily life? The Industrial Revolution diminished the need for manual labor. As someone who researches the application of AI in international business, I can’t help but wonder whether it is…

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Ukraine destroys dozens of warplanes deep inside Russia

Ukraine destroys dozens of warplanes deep inside Russia

  Kyiv Independent reports: An operation by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) using first-person-view (FPV) drones smuggled deep inside Russian and hidden inside trucks has hit 41 Russian heavy bombers at four airfields across the country, a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent on June 1. The operation — codenamed “Spider web” and a year-and-a-half in the planning — appears to have dealt a major blow to the aircraft Moscow uses to launch long-range missile attacks on Ukraine’s cities….

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Trump defies Laura Loomer, ditches Musk’s ally as nominee for NASA administrator

Trump defies Laura Loomer, ditches Musk’s ally as nominee for NASA administrator

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Deep State operatives are trying to derail President Trump’s NASA Administrator pick @rookisaacman Jared Isaacman before his Senate confirmation vote this week. A well-placed source tells me Jared Isaacman’s nomination to be the next Administrator of @NASA was set… https://t.co/FnJWyzFx73 — Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) May 31, 2025 The New York Times reports: President Trump plans to withdraw his nomination of Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and close associate of Elon Musk’s, who was on track to be the…

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Musk, Tesla blast GOP plans to end clean energy tax credits in megabill

Musk, Tesla blast GOP plans to end clean energy tax credits in megabill

Politico reports: Tesla late Wednesday criticized the Republican megabill for gutting clean energy tax credits, a message amplified by CEO Elon Musk hours after he announced he was leaving the Trump administration. “Abruptly ending the energy tax credits would threaten America’s energy independence and the reliability of our grid,” Tesla Energy, the company’s solar and battery division, wrote on X. The House-passed reconciliation package would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s residential solar credit at the end of the year and…

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Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

Microsoft bans the word ‘Palestine’ in internal emails

Waqas Ahmed and Murtaza Hussain report: Microsoft has quietly implemented a policy blocking employee emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “genocide” on its internal Exchange servers, according to No Azure for Apartheid, a group of pro-Palestine Microsoft employees. The automated filter, which silently prevents such emails from reaching recipients was first detected on Wednesday—just after Microsoft’s Build developer conference faced repeated disruptions by the activist group. Microsoft has been rocked by internal dissent over its collaboration with the Israeli…

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Google AI Overviews appears to be trapped in a time warp

Google AI Overviews appears to be trapped in a time warp

Reece Rogers reports: I’ve covered Google’s AI Overviews since its messy rollout last year, when screenshots of absurdly wrong answers started popping up at the top of search results and going viral on social media. Still, when I first saw images of AI Overviews confidently saying that it’s still 2024 in Reddit posts today, I thought they might be altered screenshots. I mean, over a billion Google users currently see the AI-generated results every month. Surely, such an obvious error…

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Trump cuts are killing a tiny office that keeps measurements of the world accurate

Trump cuts are killing a tiny office that keeps measurements of the world accurate

Wired reports: Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US’s framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth’s gravitational field. Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former…

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Trump’s memecoin dinner welcomed guests holding tokens linked to alt-right symbols and racist language

Trump’s memecoin dinner welcomed guests holding tokens linked to alt-right symbols and racist language

Wired reports: As US president Donald Trump left the stage at his golf club near Washington, DC, on Thursday night, he pointed to the crowd, brought his index finger to his temple—as if to say: You know what’s coming—then began to dance. To the beat of “Y.M.C.A” by The Village People, Trump shimmied, gyrated, and pumped his arms above his head. Looking on were more than 200 people who had been invited to the Trump National Golf Club for a…

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Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Tesla reputation now even worse than scandal-hit UnitedHealth Group

Fortune reports: Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk, widely viewed as the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, is inflicting serious damage on the image of his companies. On Tuesday, a new Axios Harris annual reputation poll showed that Tesla has continued to fall in the eyes of Americans ever since Musk waded full-on into the nation’s hyper-partisan political debate with the acquisition of Twitter. Prior to the $44 billion deal, the electric vehicle manufacturer came in eighth place in…

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Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Bluesky is plotting a total takeover of the social internet

Kate Knibbs writes: As I waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less. Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber…

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Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

Police secretly monitored everyone on the streets of New Orleans with facial recognition cameras

The Washington Post reports: For two years, New Orleans police secretly relied on facial recognition technology to scan city streets in search of suspects, a surveillance method without a known precedent in any major American city that may violate municipal guardrails around use of the technology, an investigation by The Washington Post has found. Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime….

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