Category: 404 Media

We start this week with Matthew’s story about a fascinating paper that argues if LLMs are sentient, then by those metrics so is the classic game Age of Empires II. After the break, Matthew tells us about a wild story out of Texas with a data center being built on ...

I am staring at a painted portrait of King Charles, who is wearing a red suit. The comically oversized and heavy Snap Specs I am wearing have basically created a digital version of the real painting and overlaid it over the real thing. A narrator speaking through the glasses asks ...

Behind closed doors and without expert input, the Trump administration issued a major policy change to how census data is released. Data experts are concerned the result will be less reliable public data related to redistricting, natural disasters, the workforce, housing, and more. On June 4, the Trump administration released ...

🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have discovered new evidence that the cosmic structures connecting the universe are much larger than previously predicted—persisting over billions of light years—a finding that challenges ...

Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists who have publicly criticized the venue’s use of facial recognition technology, putting their tweets and comments into a document that was then accessible to other people inside the company, 404 Media has found. The news shows that MSG, operated by Jim Dolan ...

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.  Around this time last year, Rachel Rodman was happily employed as a library clerk and program assistant with the Crawford County Library District in the east-central part of Missouri. Rodman didn’t think anything of the display she curated for Pride ...

Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s cofounders, was banned from editing the site indefinitely after other editors determined he was canvassing, or in other words, calling on his followers off platform in order to influence Wikipedia’s content.  Sanger has spent more than a decade criticizing Wikipedia for what he claims is ...

This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.  Earlier this year, an Alaskan assembly member found himself in hot water for introducing a resolution that would have prohibited the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Public Library System from making books and other media available to anyone if deemed “harmful to minors” ...

This week Joseph speaks to Jake Hanrahan, creator of the independent conflict-focused media company Popular Front. They talk all about conflict journalism and how to get your journalism out there when platforms like YouTube make it all that much harder, sometimes. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become ...

Board members of a small township in Michigan agreed to “fight to our very last breath” against an AI data center planned in their community. America’s nuclear scientists and the University of Michigan want to build a massive data center in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan. If built, the data center will, ...