A Boring Dystopia

Unsurprisingly the shift in polling is driven by conservative fascists.

Onsurez didn’t leave, though. He is an engineer and serves on the New Mexico State Emergency Response Commission — the day before, he had attended a commission meeting on hazardous materials spills. The serendipity wasn’t lost on him. 

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ramon Leonguerrero told CBS News that personnel in the Joint Operations Center in Agadir, hundreds of miles from the mock battlefield, used an AI-driven platform made by American defense tech firm Palantir “to provide that rapid decision-making cycle faster than normal.”

A judge in Delaware—a state with more registered business entities than people—ruled Monday in favor of a small town that allows corporations to vote in local elections.

From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google’s stranglehold on the web.

The project, brought by “Shark Tank” TV personality Kevin O’Leary, would span 40,000 acres, demand 9 gigawatts of power once completed, and raise the state’s carbon emissions by 64 percent, according to estimates. While its water needs remain unknown, the sprawling data center would neighbor the northernmost tip of the shrinking Great Salt Lake, which will likely hit a record-low elevation this year following an unprecedented dry winter.

…While conventional LED‑based visible light communication (VLC) systems typically operate over only a few meters, the novel photonic engine can move data over 1.2 kilometers…

Despite mounting scrutiny over Palantir’s alleged links to human rights abuses and Israeli war crimes, several major media organisations have still partnered with the company – including German publishing giant Axel Springer, the new owner of the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Jeff Bezos is so much more boring, lame and devoid of personality than a Bond Villain though it physically hurts my brain to try to relate the two in my head.

Finn Green works for the US Post Office as a rural carrier associate in and around Ojai, California. On a typical Monday, Green and other rural postal carriers deliver Amazon packages for hours without overtime pay. When mail volume is higher, such as days following legal holiday weekends and holiday seasons, carriers are ordered to prioritize Amazon parcels over Express and Registered mail, the US Postal Service’s (USPS) most expensive products. Only after completing the Amazon deliveries may carriers return to their regular route to deliver USPS mail.

Britain is not the only country suddenly developing strong opinions about VPNs. Denmark recently floated anti-piracy legislation broad enough to trigger fears that VPN usage itself could become legally risky, before ministers hurriedly insisted nobody was trying to ban VPNs. Across Europe, VPNs are being treated less like routine security software and more like an obstacle to enforcement as users turn to them to bypass restrictions.

The danger facing the United States is not that California will become the Soviet Union because one of the richest men on earth is asked to pay more tax. The danger is that America is drifting toward something far more familiar from Russia’s recent history: an authoritarian oligarchy in which vast private fortunes coexist with weakened democratic institutions and a corrupt political leader who rewards wealthy loyalists and punishes dissenters.

Error in the text: 1000mW laser with 532nm wavelength which is green light.

“I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steve Roth recently said on an earnings call, commenting on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently announced plans to tax luxury second homes owned by superrich people who don’t live in the city.

The thing is, these seeming tensions are generative and add to the appeal of right-wing ideology precisely because they don’t fully make sense. They offer their constituents the chance to both feel like persecuted victims and masters-in-waiting — to individually applaud themselves for being self-made visionaries and collectively part of a genetic or civilizational elite.

Car Companies are a force of Pure Boring Dystopia.

The liberty cities model of fewer regulations, however, has also brought with it the challenge of dealing with a landfill that moved in just outside the tiny city’s boundaries. Some balked when Nolen began talking about passing zoning rules, she said.

“Every few months, Americans are asked to resume their banquet and pretend a shooting didn’t just happen,” one commentator on Bluesky wrote after the correspondents dinner. Another account responded: “Well, in fairness, that’s what we ask of school kids.”

To our even bigger surprise, we found little to no effect. People who use generative AI quite frequently in their daily lives – at least every other day – did penalize AI use slightly less when AI authorship was disclosed, compared with people who never or rarely use AI. But participants were no more skeptical by default: When authorship was not disclosed, heavy AI users, light AI users and nonusers all tended to assume the text was written by a person and formed essentially the same impressions.

Americans love to gamble. But placing bets on wildfires, floods and storms comes with serious moral and social costs

Private healthcare provider Numan revealed that Blackpool, in Lancashire, has been forecast to have the highest number of preventable deaths in 2026.

The Spotify spokesperson said estate or rights holders for a deceased artist can opt into the company’s new tool if they have an account. For those artists who don’t have accounts, either alive or deceased, the spokesperson said, Spotify will continue to rely on its internal detection and accountability systems

Arguably more terrifying than boring, but the process of humiliation, endless lines and hostile beaucracy must be mindnumbing in the worst way too.

Asked how he’s sure that AI isn’t overhyped, Garman said, “People ask me that all the time. I think it’s like one of the funnier questions I get.” He proceeded to ask people in the audience to raise their hands if they’re seeing positive ROI now from their AI investments or if they expect to see it within six months.

Even after one of the largest environmental remediation efforts in California history, dangerous levels of lead persist in residential neighborhoods surrounding a former battery smelter in Southeast Los Angeles, according to a new study from the University of California, Irvine’s Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health. The research is published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The findings reveal a serious public health failure while also highlighting the power of community-driven research to hold institutions accountable and drive meaningful change.

When several explosions went off, I was in the street. A man and his dog approached the scene—sometimes ahead of the blast, sometimes behind it.

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The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has thrown the region into chaos, killing thousands of people, costing billions of dollars, and sending energy prices to their highest levels since the invasion of Ukraine.

This gung-ho approach from Griggs comes despite research undertaken by PwC, published in January, that indicated more than half of businesses using AI saw little or no benefit.