Category: 404 Media

Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. Amazon’s official announcement said that it ended the leaderboard because it had accomplished its goal of encouraging employees to use AI tools, but multiple Amazon employees told me they ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that spread life across space, went stir crazy for science, held the colony together, and peacefully sat it out. First, what if we went all the way to Europa only to find that some earthly bacteria already set up ...

Dark patterns have been used by subscription companies and in bait-and-switch campaigns for decades. As more chatbot companies push to keep users engaged at all costs, how do manipulative design choices show up in conversational AI built on large language models? Researchers at the Center for Democracy & Technology studied ...

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 going deeper, Google’s search changes, and a rogue zine. SAM: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the way a line of ...

Headway, a popular online therapy platform, says it will require clients and providers to undergo biometric scanning, and there’s no way to opt out other than leaving the platform. On April 3, Headway sent an email to clients informing them of the upcoming requirement: “To make sure Headway stays a ...

Rather than pay a monthly subscription for an app that plenty of people think kinda sucks, a developer has created Cracked Oura, an open source app that lets Oura ring wearers query and analyze their health data without the monthly fee.  On Thursday, Oura announced the new Ring 5, a ...

The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday.  The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 ...

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move ...

Users of the chatbot app Character.ai have been melting down on Reddit and begging the company to stop messing with the app after a series of changes that users say has completely ruined the app. The feedback is so negative that I have never seen a community or user base ...

We start this week with Sam’s deeply reported story on how deepfakes rocked a high school, and how those kids were failed at each step. After the break, Joseph tells us about BusPatrol, a company that plans to turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles. In the subscribers-only section, Jason ...