Category: 404 Media

The Wikimedia Foundation waited until the days following its largest worldwide conference to issue a statement saying it would not voluntarily recognize a union of its workers. Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested ...

Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview with GQ in May, after sharing an image of herself posing with Drake on Instagram, Slime Dot directly denied accusations that she was an “AI artist,” saying “The truth doesn’t ...

Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. ...

This week Joseph talks to Mike Yeagley. As you’ll hear, he is a very interesting guy. He introduced parts of the government to the whole idea of commercially sourced location data. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars buying the data, and showing what could be done with it. It’s ...

I’m marching across Lower Manhattan in the middle of a heatwave with a friendly mob of Luddite gnomes, and there isn’t a phone in sight. It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual magic. First, scientists have uncovered a “golden age” of languages that flourished for millennia before fading into our dark age of linguistic extinction. Then, Alan Turing’s ...

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss astrology, Flock on the brain, The Odyssey, and more. JASON: This week I wrote pretty much exclusively about Flock, and I am ...

After the Los Angeles Police Department allowed its contract with Flock to expire, the surveillance company’s CEO, Garrett Langley, told local news that people don’t understand how its technology works, and that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) only take a “static picture” of a car. “The technology is really ...

A judge caught a court reporter making AI-generated errors in a court transcript, and put stenographers everywhere on notice for their use of AI.  In a memorandum decision concerning a case about a man who sold drugs to another man who overdosed and died, filed on July 23, Judge Paul ...

🌘 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 a previously unknown behavior in orcas that involves one member of a pod holding up a massive dead sunfish while another charges and ...